ABSTRACT
Although there is a body of literature on teaching literacy in Arabic, there is little research on the process of reading Arabic. Yet, literacy in Arabic is unusual in several respects. First, modern written Arabic does not correspond to any modern spoken dialect of Arabic. There are many dialects of spoken Arabic, which vary considerably from each other. A second important feature of Arabic literacy is that, like Hebrew, the most common form of the orthography only minimally represents vowels and the syntactic markers of the oral language. There is a system of diacritics used to represent the vowels, but it is only used in the Quran and in classic poetry. Because of the unique nature of Arabic orthography, which involves two interrelated tiers, a new methodology that would take both tiers into consideration was needed; thus, a new “multitier” methodology was designed.
