This study investigated the degree to which teacher developed curriculum was aligned with the national standards in Qatar. Three sources of data included teacher response to a questionnaire, teacher interviews and expert rating of the alignment of teacher-developed materials with curriculum standards. A survey and interview questions measured…

This is a study of word decoding in adolescents with Down syndrome and in adolescents with Intellectual Deficits of unknown etiology. It was designed as a replication of studies of word decoding in English speaking and in Hebrew speaking adolescents with Williams syndrome ([0230] and [0235]). Participants' IQ was matched to IQ in the groups with…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

We compare learning of two inflection types--obligatory noun plurals and optional noun possessives. We tested 107 Hebrew-speaking children aged 6-7 on the same tasks at the beginning and end of first grade. Performance on both constructions improved during this short period, but plurals scored higher from the start, with improvement only in…

A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to…

This paper investigates the distribution of imperfective and perfective verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Spontaneous speech of three children (1 ; 8-3; 1) was analyzed for accuracy and error types. The results showed that the verbal inflections appeared correct almost all the time (89-97% of the time). Agreement errors appeared 3-11% of the…

In Jewish primary schools, religious education is centred on the study of Torah. At Sinai, according to Jewish tradition, Moses received the Torah in two parts: a written tradition (Hebrew scripture) and an oral tradition. The oral tradition contained much scriptural "interpretation" known, in Hebrew, as midrash. Midrash continued to be…

This article investigates the contribution of maternal mediation in storybook reading, socioeconomic status (SES), and home literacy environment (HLE) to children's literacy level in kindergarten and first grade in Israeli Arabic-speaking families. A total of 109 kindergarten children and their mothers participated. Children's literacy level was…

By examining why nations borrow policy discourses, research on transfer has overlooked the implementation of transferred educational practices, models, or curricula. This study attempts to bridge this gap by examining the transfer and implementation of teacher education curricula in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Based on interviews with teacher…

This study examined the effects of an intervention helping struggling readers improve their reading and writing skills in English as a foreign language (L2), and those same skills in Arabic, which was their first language (L1). Transferring linguistic skills from L2 to L1 is termed "cognitive retroactive transfer". Tests were…

The languages spoken in Nigeria do not only play significant roles in the socio-political life of the country, but also help in no small measure to unify or integrate the country that is so much diverse in all spheres of life. In realizing these multiplicity of roles the languages play in the country, the Government instituted and enacted a policy…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

The present study aimed at identifying the necessary writing skills for the second year secondary stage students in Al-Azhar institutes through implementing the second part in the first package of the Egyptian Zero project. These skills are necessary for writing compositions for the second year in Arabic as their mother tongue and in English as a…

Teachers and learners can hold differing ideas about language and goals for language learning which are then played out in classroom interactions. Constructions of what counts as language and learning impact on learner engagement and identity and the outcomes of language learning. This study analyses a researcher's account of the learning of…

This study focuses on "Independence Day", an episode of "Arab Labor" (first season, 2008), a pioneer bilingual Hebrew-Arabic satirical Israeli TV series, written by Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli author and journalist. "Arab Labor" was a breakthrough in the Israeli popular TV scape, where, as a rule, Arab-Israeli…