Literacy and comprehension- Arabic activities
There are three stages of comprehension:- The first is literal comprehension, where students can find the information included in the comprehension text and copy it as the correct answer to the question.
- The second stage is interpretation, where students can understand the text, process the provided information, and provide the answers to questions.
- The third stage is application where students can answer questions about their opinion regarding issues discussed in the text and what they would do, think or act in similar situations.
Students who have literacy problems undertake a program called Restart which covers all aspects of English (remedial English literacy). However, the focus is on comprehension. Three of the schools involved in our project offer Restart and/or English as a Second Language programs. Two of the programs involve withdrawing students from LOTE, the other seeks to boost students' literacy in both English and Arabic through both a Restart program and an Arabic-English bilingual program. The latter strategy is accompanied by a clear improvement in both languages and in Mathematics (for which Arabic is the medium of instruction). The withdrawal programs yield varied results according to the circumstances of the students.
Our study showed that all students have improved in RESTART and ARABIC LOTE. This raises interesting questions which could be the focus of further research: Was the students' improvement simply due to hard work and natural progress over time or did they improve because literacy was transferred from one language to the other?