One of the most contentious issues facing American education today is bilingual education and its efficacy or lack there of. At the core of this issue is the role of the first language in educating LEP (Limited English Proficient) students. Should the primary language be used and encouraged? Should it be discarded and replaced by the new language? Arguments are made on both sides of the debate. Numerous studies have addressed the contributions of the first language to the learning of and academic achievement in the second language. This study is a unique one in that it addressed an important and understudied language. The main focus of this research concentrated on the role of Arabic language literacy in the academic achievement of middle school students in English.
Arab-American middle school students in a suburban middle school in southeast Michigan were tested to determine their level of literacy in Arabic. 105 students met the requirements to be included in this research study. Raw scores from the Terra Nova standardized achievement test (CTB, McGraw-Hill, 1998) were compared with raw scores from an Arabic language literacy test to determine if there was a significant relationship between levels of literacy in the Arabic language and academic achievement in English reading, language and mathematics. Statistical analyses such as multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) were used to test the degree of significance between the variables.
Results from all the analyses confirmed a significant positive relationship between the achievement of Arab-American middle school students in English reading, language and mathematics and their level of literacy in the Arabic language. Subjects who were classified as having high levels of literacy in the Arabic language outscored subjects with low levels of Arabic language literacy on measures of academic achievements in English reading, language and mathematics. These findings confirmed what other researchers have discovered when studying languages such as Spanish, French and Vietnamese.
