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The Development of ADAT (Arabic Diglossic Knowledge and Awareness Test): A theoretical and clinical overview

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Handbook of Arabic Literacy

Part of the book series: Literacy Studies ((LITS,volume 9))

Abstract

Children growing up in an Arabic-speaking community must learn both a vernacular language variety (Spoken Arabic or SA) used in everyday life, and a standard language variety (Modern Standard Arabic or MSA) used for writing and formal language functions. A diglossic situation such as this poses special challenges for professionals engaged in the assessment of children’s emergent learning skills because of issues related to the simultaneous acquisition of two distinct linguistic systems. Most, if not all available Arabic language and reading assessment tools test children only in MSA. In contrast with this traditional stance, recent approaches have proposed evaluation in SA only, or in both MSA and SA, depending on the modality: written tasks versus spoken tasks. In this chapter, we will outline the development of “ADAT”, the Arabic Diglossic Knowledge and Awareness Test, which was designed to assess diglossic and metadiglossic knowledge at the elementary school level in the two language varieties of Arabic (MSA and SA) and across all language domains.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Forty percent of the total population of all Arab states over 15 years old is illiterate, with some variation across the Arab states and within each state (Maamouri 2003).

  2. 2.

    For further discussion of children’s performances on negation structures refer to Khamis-Dakwar et al. (2012).

  3. 3.

    Abu-Rabia and Taha (2004) classified children’s oral reading errors into the following types of errors: non-semantic semiphonetic errors, semantic and non-morphological semiphonetic errors, semantic dysphonetic errors, non-semantic dysphonetic errors, morphological errors, addition of functional words, visual letter confusion, irregular pronunciation rules, semantic sentence guessing, semantic errors, and omitting functional words. Similarly, children’s spelling errors were classified as phonetic errors, semiphonetic errors, dysphonetic errors, visual-letter confusion errors, irregular spelling errors, word omission, and functional word omissions.

  4. 4.

    The authors do not declare the number of words used for testing children’s spelling and they only note that the number of words for each list differed depending on the grade level.

  5. 5.

    A similar dichotomy of assessing speaking and listening using vernacular Arabic, while using MSA when assessing writing and reading is reported in the assessment of the most common proficiency tests used for assessing students learning Arabic as a second language in the United States: the ACTFL & ILR tests (Eisels 2006).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a generous grant from Oranim College and the Faculty Development Grant at Adelphi University. The authors wish to thank Karen Froud, Peter Gordon, Felicidad Garcia and Elinor Saiegh-Haddad for invaluable encouragement and support, as well as Toraya Kubetty for her professional support. A special thanks to Abed Tamesh for his artistic creativity and contribution. The authors also thank the children who participated in this study, their parents, and the teachers for their kind cooperation. Address correspondence to Reem Khamis-Dakwar, Communication Sciences and Disorders, School of Education, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11553. E-mail: khamis-dakwar@adelphi.edu, http://home.adelphi.edu/~nslplab

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Adelphi University, 1 South Avenue, Hy-Weinberg Center, Room 136, 11530, Garden City, NY, USA

    Reem Khamis-Dakwar

  2. Haifa University, Haifa, Israel

    Baha Makhoul

  3. The Centre for Educational Technology (CET), Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Baha Makhoul

Authors
  1. Reem Khamis-Dakwar
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Correspondence to Reem Khamis-Dakwar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Elinor Saiegh-Haddad

  2. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    R. Malatesha Joshi

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Khamis-Dakwar, R., Makhoul, B. (2014). The Development of ADAT (Arabic Diglossic Knowledge and Awareness Test): A theoretical and clinical overview. In: Saiegh-Haddad, E., Joshi, R. (eds) Handbook of Arabic Literacy. Literacy Studies, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8545-7_13

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