A morpho-orthographic pattern intervention for first-grade Arabic readers: effects on early literacy development

This study examined the effects of an eight-week morphological intervention on early literacy outcomes among first-grade Arabic-speaking students in northern Israel. A quasi-experimental pretest-post test design was implemented with 140 Arabic-speaking first graders, drawn from both typically developing and struggling reader populations. Students were assigned to experimental and control conditions and assessed on six measures: morphological pattern awareness, root awareness, syllable segmentation, phonemic segmentation, single-word reading, and reading comprehension. Across all six outcome measures, the experimental group showed substantially greater gains than controls, a pattern that held for both reader groups, though the intervention effects ran consistently larger among those who had entered the study already struggling. The strongest improvements were recorded in single-word reading and morphological pattern awareness. Notably, gains extended to lexical items instantiating trained patterns that had not appeared in instruction, indicating transfer beyond what item-specific learning alone would predict. The findings make a case that morpho-orthographic pattern knowledge is both teachable and consequential at the very onset of literacy acquisition, with effects that reach word-level decoding and early comprehension alike. The results indicate clear instructional implications, explicit pattern-based morphological teaching appears well-suited to early Arabic literacy curricula, and particularly so for learners whose reading development is already at risk.