Reading Arabic 'hard for brain'

In the Lebanon, an Arabic language festival encourages children to learn the Arabic alphabet

Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly hard to learn to read.

The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language - but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort.

The detail of Arabic characters means students should use only the left side of their brain because that side is better at distinguishing detail.

The findings from the study of 40 people are reported in Neuropsychology.

When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds.

It is the ability to tell letters apart that seems to work differently in Arabic - because telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots.

Professor Zohar Eviatar, who led the research team, said: "The particular characteristics of Arabic make it hard for the right hemisphere to be involved. When you are starting something new, there is
a lot of [right hemisphere] involvement."

The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only spoke Hebrew, while some also spoke and read Arabic well.

In order to work out which side of the brain reads letters, the researchers flashed letters for a 10th of a second to one side of a screen or the other.

When the eyes see something for just a short time, and it is at one side of a screen, only one brain hemisphere is quick enough to process the image.

The team measured how fast and how accurate the students were when they tried to tell letters apart, first in Hebrew and then in Arabic.

In Gaza, children learn to read Arabic

All the students could read Hebrew well, and they all used both left and right hemispheres to tell Hebrew letters apart.

The same thing has previously been found with English letters.

Characters in English and Hebrew are easier to tell apart because there are clearer differences between them than there are in Arabic.

When they looked at the students' reading of Arabic letters it gave the team a clue about why children find the language difficult to learn to read.

The Hebrew-only speakers behaved like children just starting to read most languages - they tried to tell Arabic letters apart, managed to do it slowly but made a lot of mistakes, and used both
hemispheres of their brains.

The good Arabic readers, however, only used their left hemispheres to tell Arabic letters apart.

The researchers were intrigued by this and investigated further. They wanted to know why the right hemisphere was not working when reading Arabic letters, so they set a right hemisphere challenge.

They showed the students pairs of extremely similar Arabic letters - with just "local" differences - and letters that are more different - with "global" differences.

When the Arabic readers saw similar letters with their right hemispheres, they answered randomly - they could not tell them apart at all.

"The right hemisphere is more sensitive to the global aspects of what it's looking at, while the left hemisphere is more sensitive to the local features," says Professor Eviatar.

The team think this may give them some clues about what readers may be doing wrong when they begin to try to read Arabic.

Both young children and adults call on both hemispheres to help them learn a new task.

And using both hemispheres is the right thing to do when reading English or Hebrew - so children's learning strategies would be fine if they were reading another language.

But previous research has found that the right hemisphere is not that good at distinguishing small details, so readers starting to learn Arabic have to learn to focus on small details, which is not
natural to them, but could help them shift to their left hemispheres.

Now the researchers want to compare new and highly expert Arabic readers in the hope of finding out what their brains are doing when they look at letters.

Ultimately, they would like to work out how to teach Arabic reading better to children, including helping them to tell letters apart and how to remember which sound goes with which letter.

More on This Story

Campaign to save the Arabic language in Lebanon

Most Lebanese youth speak a mixture of Arabic, French and English

When Randa Makhoul, an art teacher at a school in Beirut, asks her students a question in Arabic, she often gets a reply in English or French.

"It's frustrating to see young people who want to speak their mother tongue articulately, but cannot string a sentence together properly," she said at the Notre Dame de Jamhour school in the Lebanese
capital.

Mrs Makhoul is just one of several Lebanese teachers and parents who are concerned that increasing numbers of young people can no longer speak Arabic well, despite being born and raised in the Middle
Eastern country.

She welcomes a campaign launched by the Feil Amer (Act Now) organisation to preserve Arabic in Lebanon, called "You speak from the East, and he replies from the West".

"Our objective is to link the Arabic language to modern art and culture... to end the perception among young people that the formal language is outdated and dull," says Suzanne Talhouk, the president of
Feil Amer.

Ms Talhouk says the Lebanese will always embrace several languages, but she hopes to encourage the production of novels, theatre and other artistic works in formal Arabic.

"We're not fighting other languages as much as promoting the use of Arabic to go with all the changes in the world."

Arabic is the official language of Lebanon, but English and French are widely used.

Most Lebanese speak French - a legacy of France's colonial rule - and the younger generation gravitates towards English.

A growing number of parents send their children to French lycees or British and American curriculum schools, hoping this will one day help them find work and secure a better future.

Some even speak to their children in French or English in the home.

"It's sad no-one in our generation is speaking Arabic properly anymore," says Lara Traad, a 16-year-old student at Notre Dame de Jamhour, one of Lebanon's many French curriculum schools.

"I really regret that my parents did not concentrate more on developing my Arabic. It's too late now, but maybe for the younger students in the country something can be done."

Even with Arabic, there is a big difference between the classical, written form of the language and the colloquial spoken Lebanese dialect.

The classical language is almost never used in conversation - it's only heard on the news, in official speeches, and some television programmes.

As a result, many young Lebanese struggle with basic Arabic reading and writing skills, and it is not uncommon for students as old as 16 or 17 to speak only broken Arabic.

The problem is seen in several parts of the Arab world where foreign schools are common - the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and most North African states.

Campaign flyers show Arabic in the web-friendly Latin script

Citing the wide gap between the formal language and its various colloquial forms within the Arab world, Egyptian philosopher Mustapha Safwaan once wrote that classical Arabic was theoretically a dead
language, much like Latin or ancient Greek.

But language expert Professor Mohamed Said says classical Arabic is a unifying force in the Arab world.

"Classical Arabic is the language of communication, literature, science, philosophy, the arts - it is something that unites the Arab world," says Prof Said, a senior Arabic language lecturer at
London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

According to Prof Said, colloquial dialects in the Arab world should not be seen as separate linguistic entities, but a continuance of the classical Arabic form.

Lebanon's language campaign was launched by Feil Amer as part of its ongoing efforts to promote Arabic language and culture among Lebanon's youth.

The group organises workshops in schools and universities to raise awareness among pupils about the importance of protecting their mother tongue.

It is also holding an Arabic language festival to showcase the work of 150 artists in the fields of dance and drama.

The hope is that by protecting the Arabic language in Lebanon, it will in turn protect the country's identity and heritage.

Whether the initiative is enough to change how Lebanon's youth communicate and express themselves is another matter.

Corrected on 24 June: Our original story incorrectly stated that the campaign was organised by Lebanon's ministry of culture.