Texts for reading instruction and the most common words in modern standard Arabic: an investigation

Reading instruction for young Arabic speakers presents challenges for textbook publishers and teachers. In the present study, the authors conduct an analysis at the word level of four multidisciplinary textbooks for reading instruction in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer the following questions: What are the most common words in standard Arabic? How many of the most common words in standard Arabic are used in the textbooks? How dense is the use of common words? How many rare words are used in the textbooks studied? A word frequency analysis from existing corpora were used to create a most common word list. From that list, the researchers were able to determine frequency and dispersion of the most common words in Arabic that were also used in the textbooks. Frequency and dispersion were calculated by octile, as well. Analysis found that the texts did not make use of any of the rare words found in the corpus, but many words in the texts did not appear in either the reference corpus inclusive of the common words list. Recommendations for policymakers and textbook publishers follow discussion of results.