The relations of SES and literacy-related oral and written language skills after one year of reading instruction – evidence from novice readers of Arabic

Abstract

Abstract The relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and language skills at the onset of reading acquisition has not received much attention in research. In this study, a standardized battery of oral and written language tests was administered to 127 Arabic-speaking children at the end of first grade. SES-related differences were found in a line of oral language measures (vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and listening comprehension), but not in phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN), nor in any of the reading components (decoding, word reading, reading comprehension and orthographic knowledge). These findings point to a distinction between two groups of language skills with regard to their relations with SES in the first year of reading instruction. The results imply that SES should not be regarded as a mediating factor in the development of PA, RAN and reading in first grade among novice readers of Arabic.