A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and…