Representation of Arabic Narratives in Digital Media - A Case Study

Abstract

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.