Abstract:

Word knowledge is considered critical for language comprehension in overall and for literacy development and academic success in specific. When commencing junior high, pupils are required to be equipped with the necessary academic vocabulary repertoire in order to efficiently cope with the academic reading materials and writing demands across the different disciplines. Nowadays, and due to its importance in the road to literacy, the investigation of academic vocabulary has escalated, attempting to assess what it encompasses, the required core academic vocabulary, its effect on reading comprehension skills and more. In light of the academic demands of the 21st century such thorough examination is essential, especially in the case of diglossic Arabic- characterized by the immense linguistic gap between its spoken and written form.

For the first time, the presented study will depict the attempts for investigating academic vocabulary knowledge of 1322 junior-high Arabic speaking pupils (seventh to eighth grade), representing the different Arab communities in Israel (i.e., general Arab community, Druze community and Bedouin community). For this purpose and based on the existing scientific literature, a corpus based academic Arabic vocabulary list was developed, including the necessary academic words in junior high where it was utilized for developing the assessment test. Accordingly, the pupils were tested by using an objective reading comprehension test, assessing their ability to adequately cope with informational academic text. The obtained data pointed to a significant differences in academic vocabulary knowledge between the different age groups, Arab communities and between the genders. A developmental trend in academic vocabulary was observed where significantly better performance was noted among eighth and ninth graders when compared to seventh graders. In addition, higher performance was noted among the Druze community, whereas pupils from the Bedouin community showed lowest attainments. Ultimately, gender differences in academic vocabulary knowledge was noted across the different age groups in junior-high, where girls showed higher performance than boys. The implications of the research results will be discussed in relation to the existing scientific data, the educational field and content developing.

Keywords:

Academic vocabulary, reading comprehension, junior-high school, Arabic.