Arab Educational Information Network

The aim of this study was to examine reading errors among second grade emeriti students. The study sample included 168 Emirati second grade students (87 males and 81 females). One hundred forty-four words were randomly selected from the Arabic reading curriculum. Those words were classified into lexical categories as nouns (45%), verbs (34%), adjectives and adverbs (10%), and functional words (i.e., prepositions and conjunctions; 11%). They were also classified into three levels of linguistic difficulty (i.e., easy, difficult, and very difficult) according to their morphological complexity. The results revealed that reading difficulties may be the result of a threefold interrelated paradigm: the difficulty level of the words (i.e., morphological complexity), the lexical category (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjective and adverbs, and prepositions and conjunctions), and the pattern of the reading error (e.g., omission of a letter or a syllable and reading the geminated letter as ingeminated). (Published abstract)