Functional Activation of Grammar During Oral Reading

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the grammatical errors made by Arabic teachers during oral reading. The study took place during the fall semester of the academic year 2021/2020. The random sample consisted of 50 teachers who were registered in the practical education Arabic program and expected to graduate from the College of Education at Kuwait University. The teachers were asked to place appropriate fnal-letter diacritical marks on a two-page informational text with a fourth-grade readability level and provide an audio recording demonstrating their oral reading of that text. On average, results showed that Arabic teachers made 94 grammatical errors per 463 words, which 20 percent of teachers’ oral reading was grammatically incorrect. No teacher was successful in reading a two-page text without any grammatical errors. Twelve grammatical functions, out of the 30 total functions included in the text, constituted two-thirds of the overall grammatical errors. In the interviews conducted with the teachers at the conclusion of the study, they attributed their errors to several reasons, most notably the absence of the purpose of learning grammar, ineffective instructional practices that are based on memorization, and the lack of coherence between grammar course.