TITLE:
Arab Students Learning Arabic as Their First Language and Jewish Students Learning Arabic as Their Second Language
AUTHORS:
Salim Abu-Rabia, Khalid Tarabeh, Haneen Wattad
KEYWORDS:
Bilingual Education, Metalinguistic Awareness, Arabic, Bilingual Schools
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.13 No.2,
February
14,
2022
ABSTRACT: The goal of the present study is to investigate how Arabic is acquired among Jewish pupils who learn it as a second language (SL) in Israel and how Arabs acquire the Arabic language as their first language (L1). Both groups study Arab together in bilingual schools. This topic has not been investigated in bilingual schools in Israel. Such a study of this topic may clarify the developmental process of Arabic among Arab and Jewish students compared with their peers in regular monolingual schools. The research population comprised of random samples of 30 Arabic pupils and 30 Jewish pupils from each grade level: An overall sample consisted of 180 participants from bilingual schools. Similar sample was sampled from regular monolingual Arab and Jewish schools. The statistical analysis revealed no significant differences between pupils’ groups in the 3rdgrade, particularly about Arab pupils learning in bilingual schools and Arab pupils learning in monolingual schools. However, the result of the higher grades revealed that bilingual pupils, Arabs and Jews, received better abilities regarding Arabic than their Arab peers learning in monolingual schools, which supports the idea of the advantages in providing bilingual education from an early age for both Jews and Arabs in Israel.