Enhancing Arab early grade performance: The Al Qasimi Foundation methodology

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Emerging Landscape of Philanthropy and Education

Proposal

Reading programs for low-income populations often give disappointing results. Failures may be partly due to a neglect of practice in letter identification and decoding. Perceptual learning research shows that visual stimuli are best learned symbol by symbol, with pattern analogies and much practice to unite smaller components and speed up identification. Due to working memory limitations, the prerequisite for comprehending volumes of text is parallel-processing of letters. This happens when the letter-by-letter decoding function moves to the visual word form area of the brain, that recognizes words as if they were faces.
Perceptually enhanced textbooks have been piloted in multiple countries and scripts, such as Telugu, Chichewa, Nepali, and Arabic. Results greatly surpass the usual teaching methods and have been presented in earlier CIES conferences.

Arab children worldwide read too slowly to make sense of simple or complex material. Working memory does not take up sufficient text, and the linguistic complexities slow down its comprehension and exceed working memory capacity.
The Arabic diglossia further complicates a perceptually challenging script.
The Al Qasimi foundation methodology consists of (a) literacy using a perceptually enhanced text and (b) oral grammar instruction focusing on conjugations and other differences from the various vernaculars. The two courses are taught in parallel and last about 4 months. Students may attain basic reading as well as comprehension. There are data from multiple pilots in UAE and Egypt, while implementation is expanding to Morocco and Tunisia. The Queen Rania foundation of Jordan has implemented only the reading component. The presentation will discuss the rationale and goals and present the data from the above pilots. Though this specific methodology is for Arabic, the model has given very good results in other countries and writing systems. These will also be briefly presented.

Authors

• Helen Abadzi, University of Texas at Arlington

• Ray Langsten, Social Research Center / American Univ in Cairo