Morphosyntactic abilities and reading skills in Arabic speaking Egyptian children with poor academic achievement

Abstract

Background: The most common learning disability affecting academic performance is Dyslexia. Linguistic abilities like morphological awareness, semantic and syntactic abilities play a key role in reading development too. The paper aimed to study the extent and properties of morphological aspects and syntactic functioning in relation to reading skills in a group of Egyptian children having poor academic achievement as for designing suitable intervention plans for these children. Patients and Methods: Our study aimed to assess the extent and properties of morphological aspects and syntactic functioning in relation to reading skills in 40 Egyptian Arabic speaking children of the same socioeconomic state and age range from 6 years to 8 years with poor academic performance. The children divided into two groups were subjected to a protocol of assessment applied in Phoniatrics Unit Kasr Al aini Hospital, Arabic Dyslexia Assessment Test and language skills assessment by Receptive Expressive Arabic Language scale- REAL scale were applied. Results: All children with poor scholastic achievement were found to be at risk for developing dyslexia if not suffering from it. They suffered from below average level of performance in receptive, expressive and total language. All language parameters showed significant correlation with rapid naming. Below average morpho-syntactic abilities of children with poor scholastic achievement significantly correlated with tests of attainment (except for spelling) and diagnostic tests (except for bead threading). Conclusion: Our study supports that language disability underlies poor scholastic achievement.