Abstract:

Goals:
The current study elaborated on a previous study which examined the efficacy of the "Golden Triangle" intervention program designed to promote literacy in Arab middle school students through the use of a blended learning-teaching environment. While the previous research used a controlled design and indicated a stronger effect size in reading comprehension improvement in the experiment group compared to control group, the current study aimed to investigate the prolonged effects the "Golden Triangle" intervention program, while also taking into account the heterogeneity of reading abilities and achievements in the classroom. The current study's main goals were to understand and differentiate the impact of blended learning on both struggling and typical readers in the classroom.

Method:
Participants were 70 Arabic native speakers in Northern Israel, representing all Arab sectors in Israel. All students received the "Golden Triangle" intervention program, which was based on the station-rotation model that offers a dynamic combination of one-on-one, group and independent learning, both in a classroom setting and in a digitized technological environment. Receptive academic vocabulary, productive academic vocabulary and reading comprehension tests were administered at three time points during the study: before and after the intervention, and five months after the program, in eight-grade. Participants were divided into two groups according to their teachers' evaluations before the start of the intervention (the median was used as a cut-off due to small sample size): 36 students comprised the high-performance group (High reading comprehension; HRC) and 34 students comprised the low-performance group (Low reading comprehension; LRC).

Results:
Results showed that while the LRC group improved their achievements in reading comprehension at the end of the program compared to achievements attained before its start, performance in this group declined in the eighth-grade and the prolonged effect of the program was not significant. However, the HRC group showed improvement during the program and also managed to maintain this improvement in eighth grade, thus showing the prolonged effects the intervention strived for regarding students' literacy and reading comprehension.

Conclusions:
Findings indicate the different effects of the program on academic linguistic literacy in differently abled students and suggest that while the "Golden Triangle" program can be effective for typical or high achieving students, different ways of accommodating and promoting the struggling student in the long-run need to be further investigated.

Keywords:

Literacy, Arabic, Intervention, Blended learning, learning deficits.