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Developing an efficient Arabic grade 1 textbook based on cognitive science

Wed, March 8, 11:30am to 1:00pm, Sheraton Atlanta, Floor: 2, Macon (South Tower)

Proposal

Poor countries have a high dropout rate due to status of the parents, childhood diseases, home illiteracy, limited instructional time, and poor teaching quality. Teachers often have little education, so they do not carry out varied and complex activities. They may also be biased toward students who are stronger and pay less attention to weaker students. Furthermore, the adopted curricula and resources are designed for students of middle and high income.
Lower-income Arab students often fail in reading. This is the most fundamental skill and is needed for any further schooling (Abadzi, 2006). Such issues arise particularly in Yemen, Sudan, rural Morocco, or Mauritania.
Besides poverty, Arab students face additional reading challenges related to the visual complexity of the Arabic script. In particular, 23 letters of Arabic script consist of connected lines that look similar to each other and differ only by number and position of dots. In addition, the forms of these letters differ when they are in the beginning, middle, final, and isolated positions. This gives an estimated total of 113 different shape. Add to this, there are 12 short vowels in Arabic that are written above and below the letters. Even among advanced readers, Arabs who know both Hebrew and Arabic identify letters and words of Arabic significantly slower than Hebrew letters and words (Eviatar and Ibrahim, 2014).
The visual complexity of Arabic script slows down reading automaticity. Automaticity is important because working memory must be able to hold a message long enough for it to be understdood. When people are fluent readers, they can process a vast amount of information that they receive from their senses. It is important, therefore, to find innovative and scientifically sound means for developing textbooks for low-income Arab students.
We have taken advantage of research which indicates that reading starts as a perceptual learning function. Perceptual learning is a function of all animals. It mainly happens without conscious effort, in the implicit memory system. With practice lines are linked into letter shapes, and these are grouped and processed in the brain simultaneously as a group (Gori & Facoetti, 2013; Maidment et al., 2015). Pattern analogies help a lot. They enable the brain to take in a set of symbols and with practice use the pieces to create larger units; and ultimately to compose complex configurations. In most languages, the visual stimuli must be coupled with associated sounds. Perceptual learning competently links visual symbols and sounds, particularly when there is a one-to-one correspondence among them (van Orden, 1987; van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 2011). Initially, letters require an optimal size and spacing, but with practice students become habituated to smaller stimuli that are barely separated or are calligraphically connected. (Pelli, Burns, Farrell, et al., 2006; see Marinelli et al., 2011 for a review). The crucial requirement for automaticity is practice. Learning curves determine the rate of speed.
We used these perceptual and neurocognitive principles to develop a textbook that the weakest students could learn to read from, and the weaker teachers might also teach from. The book starts with simplest Arabic letters and gradually increases in complexity. The main task for teachers and students would be individual practice, with teacher providing feedback.
The presentation will cover the developing and testing aspects of the book:
- Choosing the letter order and combinations, choosing fonts.
- Selecting vocabulary and stories in a gradual way, so that the students would only practice the shapes that they know.
- Piloting the parts of the book, initially with a special education student
- Making choices and decisions on the basis of the informal student observations.
Towards the end of 2016, the book will be submitted for reviews, revised further, and then piloted with classes of students in the Gulf countries as well as rural Sudan.
The presentation in March 2017 will offer the above information and updates, along with rich videos of the learning process. If achievement data are available by that time, they will also be presented.


References
Abadzi, H. (2006). Efficient Learning for the Poor: Insights from the Frontier of Cognitive Neuroscience. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Eviatar, Z., & Ibrahim, R. (2014). Why is it hard to read Arabic?. In Handbook of Arabic literacy (pp. 77-96). Springer Netherlands.
Gori, S. & Facoetti, A. (2013). Perceptual learning as a possible new approach for remediation and prevention of developmental dyslexia. Vision Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2013.11.011
Maidment D.W., Kang H., Gill E.C. & Amitay, S. (2015) Acquisition versus Consolidation of Auditory Perceptual Learning Using Mixed-Training Regimens. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0121953. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0121953.
Marinelli, C. V., Martelli, M. L., Praphamontripong, P., Zoccolotti, P. & Abadzi, H. (2011). Visual and linguistic factors in literacy acquisition: Instructional Implications for Beginning Readers in Low-Income Countries. World Bank: World Bank, Global Partnership for Education, Working Paper Series on Learning no. 2.
Pelli, D. G., C. Burns, B. Farell, & Moore-Page, D.C. (2006). Feature detection and letter identification. Vision Research, 46(28), 4646-4674.
Van Orden, G. C. (1987) A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading. Memory and Cognition, 15(3), 181-198.
Van Orden, G. C., Pennington, B.F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). 

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