Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Phonological and Morphological Awareness from Arabic (L1) to English (L3): Evidence from a Classroom-Based Intervention

This study examined the impact of explicit phonological and morphological instruction in the students’ first language, Arabic, on the literacy-related skills in English as a typologically distant third language (L3). Eighty-six typical fifth-grade readers, Arabic speakers, took part in a quasi-experimental intervention in a classroom setting. Two intact classes (n = 28) received systematic instruction of Arabic phonological and morphological skills twice a week over four months. Three other comparison classes (n = 58) adhered to the standard Arabic curriculum. The pre-and post-intervention assessments of phonological and morphological awareness were conducted in Arabic and English, and the parallel tasks of deletion, segmentation, blending, and identification and inflectional morphology were used. The results of the repeated-measures analyses showed that the intervention students made significantly more improvement, as compared to control students, in both Arabic and English. Improvements in English phonological and morphological awareness were observed. The results indicate initial evidence suggesting that the positive influence of L1 teaching with a metalinguistic approach, even if it is explicit, can transfer to cross-linguistic literacy in pairs of languages that are morphologically and orthographically distinct.