Literacy Beat

Thomas DeVere Wolsey with Freddy Hiebert and Ibrahim M. Karkouti

At AERA 2022 in San Diego, we presented

The authors conducted an analysis at the word level of four Arabic multidisciplinary textbooks in grades one and two in Egypt.  The study sought to answer four questions:  What are the most common words in standard Arabic? How many of the most common words in standard Arabic are used in the textbooks? How dense is the use of common words? How many rare words are used in the textbooks studied? Analysis found that the texts did not make use of any of the rare words found in the corpus, but many words in the texts did not appear in either the reference corpus inclusive of the common words list.  Recommendations for policymakers and textbook publishers were included.

Filed under: international, vocabulary, Wolsey | Tagged: Hiebert, Karkouti, Wolsey |