Search

This study examined the experiences of Palestinian parents (n=105) and teachers (n=99) for students with disabilities by the shift to distance Learning during Covid 19, in focusing on communication, student progress, support services, and stress levels. Participants answered a Likert scale questionnaire and three open questions. Findings revealed no significant differences between parents and teachers related to the examine parameters but it is indicated the gender as a significant factor in stress levels. Males, whether parents or teachers, reported less stress. Mothers expressed the least satisfaction with support services, contrasting with female teachers. This highlights possible disparities for mothers in accessing vital support during remote learning. Distance learning introduces distinct challenges, with both teachers and parents highlighting the need for proficiency in online platforms. Emphasizing tech-savviness is crucial in today's educational setting. Both groups stressed the importance of emotional support, extending this need to everyone involved. The conclusion underscores the importance of joint solutions tailored to the specific requirements of students, parents, and teachers.

IntroductionArabic, a Semitic language, displays a particularly rich derivational morphological system with all verb stems consisting of a semantic root and a prosodic verb-pattern. Such regular and frequently encountered knowledge is expected to be acquired early. The present study presents a developmental perspective on the relative contribution of morphological and semantic complexity to the acquisition of verbs in Spoken Arabic.MethodVerbs in a spontaneous corpus from 133 typically developing children, 2; 6–6; 0-year-old, were coded for type and token frequency of verbal patterns and root type, and classified according to semantic complexity.ResultsResults support an item-based emergence driven by semantic complexity at the earliest stages of acquisition. A developmental expansion in the diversity of verbal patterns and morphological complexity was observed with age. Morphological complexity is only identified when the same root appears in different verb patterns.DiscussionThe late emergence of the same root in different verb patterns indicates that the perception of verb patterns as abstract linguistic entities beyond the actual verbs is attained later than the semantically-constrained verbs in earlier childhood. We conclude that whereas semantic complexity obstructs verbs from emerging in the lexicon in younger age groups, morphological complexity constitutes no such obstruction, since their perception as morphological devices is attained later in acquisition.

This study examined the level of social communication problems (SCP), social anxiety (SA), and mood problems (MP) among children with ASD (age 4-13 years) enrolled in special classes (n = 74) and regular classes (n = 73) and grade level (kindergarten, 1st-3rd, 4th-6th) from teachers' perspective in schools of Palestinian Arabs in Israel. Teachers responded to three questionnaires about (1) SCP, (2) SA and (3) MP; the teachers' responses to the questionnaires were used to answer the research questions. Results: SCP, SA and MP were of medium rates for students with ASD enrolled in regular and special classes. No significant differences in the level of SCP could be attributed to class type (Regular, Special) or the grade level (kindergarten, 1st-3rd, 4th-6th). There were significant differences in SA levels that could be attributed to grade level in favor of the 4th-6th grades but there were no significant differences according to class type (Regular, Special). There were statistically significant differences in MP levels that could be attributed to the class type in favor of special classes, and the effect of grade level was not significant. There was a direct significant relationship between SCP, SA, and MP. Conclusion: SCP may be an important risk factor for the development of SA and MP among students with ASD, which lead us to incorporating social skills interventions by educational staff to alleviate or even prevent symptoms of SA and MP among students with ASD, which supports the view of inclusion

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98 typically developing (TD) Arabic-speaking preschoolers aged 2;6 to 5;0. We report here on the internal consistency of Arabic-MPU against different types of elicitation procedures, and its external validity. We show that the new tool is developmentally sensitive and hence can be utilized for the assessment of the language growth in Spoken Arabic. This new tool should contribute to further research and development of measures for language assessment. In addition, it can be used for language screening in preschoolers for the purpose of identifying young speakers of Arabic who exhibit delays in early language development.

This case study aims to compare narratives written in digital media by Arabic native speaking teenagers in Israel. The data was collected from two schools in Kufr Qari’ village in the Triangle region. Of these students, 35 were boys (45%) and 43 were girls (55%). The teenagers are of different ages (13, 15, 17 years old) who wrote stories in their preferred writing system (WS) used in digital media (Arabic, Arabic written with Roman alphabets, or Arabic written in Hebrew letters). Focusing on the macrostructure as well as the microstructure, we investigate differences in narratives among the different age groups across several skills as well as differences across the varied writing systems. In analyzing the narrative texts, we applied several statistical models. All macro and micro element evaluations were compared across ages and language choices within a Generalized Linear Model (GLM) framework. The results show significance by age for the Macrostructures of goal and meta ending as they require deeper thinking skills. Moreover, WS affected the macro- and microstructure of the narrative. Producing a narrative in Arabic script burdened the teens due to the diglossic nature of the language and orthographic complexities. In Arabic script, the use of MSA nouns and verbs added to the quality of the macrostructure. In addition, girls tended to choose Arabic, whereas boys were more likely to choose Hebrew script. This may be ascribed to social factors. Finally, girls regularly generated more micro elements in parallel to the boys’ micro-element production.