Effectiveness of a Phonological Awareness Training for Arabic Disabled Reading Children: Insights on Metalinguistic Benefits

We examined the effects of a phonological awareness (PA) training program on word reading and pseudo-word decoding in dyslexic children reading the Arabic language (n=10; mean age= 129.74 months) in comparison to normal readers (n=10; mean age = 126.90 months) from grades 4 and 5. Particular attention was paid to phonological training of two metalinguistic readingrelated skills: morphological awareness (MA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN), underscored as main predictive metalinguistic factors in Arabic dyslexia (Layes, Lalonde, Mecheri, Rebaï, 2015). The PA training program focused on phoneme/syllable identification, phoneme matching, and word segmentation. The results indicate that the dyslexic group performed significantly better in all post-training measurements, increasing reading, phonological processing, and metalinguistic-related skills, which indicates a strong relationship between these variables. The normal group only improved in MA production. These findings are discussed in terms of metalinguistic insights of reading gained through training in phonological awareness..