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With the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production and the emergence of the “information revolution,” modern technology has pervaded almost every aspect of human life. In education, however, information technology has yet to find a place, despite the unceasing attempts to “fit” it into the existing educational system. The paper argues that the industrial mode of production was successful in inventing “education” as a new paradigm, institutionalizing it in schools, and implementing it through a number of tools, such as “certified” teachers, curricula, and textbooks. By contrast, the information mode of production has created the tools, namely “educational technology,” before developing a corresponding paradigm or institution. This crisis of educational technology is therefore a corollary of its misplacement, and subsequent malfunction, in the still-in-use industrial paradigm and institution (education and school). The paper suggests that, in order to ensure a proper functionality of modern technology, we need to resolve this theoretical inadequacy. A possible solution would be to thoroughly restructure “education” and schools, as remnants of the industrial age, into a new paradigm and institution.

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the notion of default over several years. Sixty Jordanian children, equally divided among six age groups (three to eight years), completed an oral real-word pluralization task and a nonsense-word pluralization task. The findings indicate that feminine sound plurals are acquired before and extended to the other plural forms. Productivity and frequency seem to shape the acquisition patterns among younger children, but predictability becomes more critical at a later age. Younger children use the most productive plural as the default form, but older children tend to use two default forms based on frequency distributions in the adult language. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Previous research on Arabic heritage speakers points to notable variability in the language proficiencies of Arabic heritage speakers, both as individuals and as groups (Albirini & Benmamoun, 2012; Albirini, Benmamoun, & Saadah, 2011). This study examines the language proficiencies of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers, assesses the relationship between their L1 proficiency levels and other linguistic, socio-affective, socio-contextual, and demographic factors, and explores the relative significance of these factors in determining proficiency in heritage Arabic. A total of 20 Egyptian and 20 Palestinian heritage speakers completed an oral narrative that was used for assessing three dimensions of their language proficiencies, namely fluency, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic complexity. In addition, the participants filled in a 182-item questionnaire about the factors potentially influencing their heritage language skills, including language input, language use, language attitudes, ethnic identity, family role, community support, school, and demographics. The study also involved follow-up interviews with a sample of five Palestinian and five Egyptian participants. The results showed that the Palestinian speakers outperformed their Egyptian counterparts in terms of language fluency, accuracy, complexity, and overall proficiency. Pearson and Spearman correlations indicated that language use, language input, family role, community support, and parents’ language correlate positively with language proficiency. Multiple regression analyses showed that language use (in terms of frequency, range, and contexts) is the only significant predictor of the variability in heritage language proficiency. Lastly, the interviews revealed that the Palestinian heritage speakers’ linguistic advantage over their Egyptian counterparts might be attributed to their commitment to Arabic as a main marker of their heritage and identity, the encouragement of their families to maintain their heritage language, and the wider social networks to which they had access. The implications of the study are discussed.

This study examined two common accounts of heritage speakers’ nonnative attainment in their heritage/first language (L1), one attributing it to the influence of the second language (L2) and another to insufficient L1 input. Three groups of children who were heritage speakers of Arabic and who varied in their age of L2 exposure and type and amount of L1 input (n = 31) were compared to monolingual Arabic-speaking children (n = 12). The participants completed three oral tasks targeting subject-verb agreement, plural morphology, and relative clauses. The findings revealed significant differences among the groups, except between the monolingual group and the group of heritage speakers that had not been exposed to English at the time of the study. Although both L2 exposure and L1 input correlated positively with the children’s overall accuracy, age of L2 exposure was the only significant predictor of accuracy. The disparity in the groups’ performance was also explained by the properties of the linguistic forms under study.

This study examines the social functions of codeswitching (CS) between Standard Arabic (SA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The data came from thirty-five audio and video recordings in the domains of religious lectures, political debates, and soccer commentaries. The findings suggest that speakers create a functional division between the two varieties by designating issues of importance, complexity, and seriousness to SA, the High code, and aligning less important, less serious, and accessible topics with DA, the Low code. The CS patterns therefore reproduce the unequal social values and distribution of SA and DA in the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape and simultaneously call for a reconceptualization of the notion of diglossia as presented in Ferguson's (1959) work. Other functions of CS as a marker of speakers' attitudes and as an index of pan-Arab or Muslim identities are discussed. (Arabic, bidialectal codeswitching, High/Low dichotomy, functional diglossia, identity, language attitudes)*

One of the major claims in Arabic linguistic research is that Standard Arabic (SA) is a second language for native speakers of Arabic simply because it is not acquired naturally from parents. This study examines this claim by investigating whether Arabic speakers’ proficiency in SA converges with their proficiency in Colloquial Arabic (CA) or English. Sixteen native Arabic speakers completed three oral production tasks and three written production tasks. These speakers were compared to ten native English speakers with respect to English proficiency. The findings revealed that the Arabic speakers performed significantly worse on the SA oral task than on the CA oral task, but the opposite was true on the writing task. Their overall proficiencies in SA and CA were not significantly different. However, they performed significantly worse on English than on SA and CA and worse than the native English speakers. Overall, the findings suggest that the Arabic native speakers’ proficiency in SA is closer to their proficiency in CA (their L1) than their proficiency in English (their Ln).

The study investigated the acquisition of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by second language (L2) learners and by heritage speakers of the colloquial varieties of Arabic. The study focused on three questions: (1) whether heritage speakers who enroll in college‐level elementary MSA classes have an advantage over their L2 counterparts, (2) whether any potential advantage that heritage speakers may bring into the classroom carries on to a later stage of their MSA learning, and (3) the role of positive or negative transfer from the colloquial variety in the acquisition of MSA in a formal setting. Thirty‐five heritage speakers (19 elementary and 16 advanced), 28 advanced L2 learners, and 16 native‐speaker controls completed five negation tasks. The results indicated that, whereas elementary heritage speakers entered the MSA classroom with an advantage over their L2 counterparts in the area under study, the advanced heritage speakers exhibited patterns that were comparable to those of the L2 learners. Unlike their L2 counterparts, however, the advanced heritage speakers displayed positive and negative transfer effects from colloquial Arabic. The findings are discussed in the framework of three models/hypotheses of first language transfer to a third language, and their pedagogical implications for Arabic language teaching and learning are explicated.

This study examines heritage speakers’ knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language varieties, including Colloquial Arabic (QA), on SA acquisition. 1 To this end, the study compares 35 heritage speakers, 28 L2 learners, and 16 controls with respect to sentential negation, an area where SA and QA diverge significantly. The participants completed five oral tasks targeting negation of eight different clause types. The findings showed that L2 learners and heritage speakers performed comparably, encountered similar difficulties, and produced similar patterns of errors. However, whereas L2 learners did not display clear transfer effects from L1 (English), heritage speakers showed both positive and negative influence of L1 (QA). The results shed light on the dynamics of the interaction between the spoken heritage languages and their written standard counterparts with specific focus on diglossic contexts.

The nature and extent of the impact of language transfer in majority–minority language contexts have been widely debated in both second- and heritage-language acquisition. This study examines four linguistic areas in three oral narratives collected from Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers in the United States (namely, plural and dual morphology, possessive constructions, and restrictive relative clauses), with a special focus on how the second language (English) influences the structure and use of these areas in connected discourse. In addition, the study examines the relationship between second-language transfer and the incompleteness and attrition of heritage Arabic. The findings show that heritage speakers have various gaps in their knowledge of the examined areas, particularly in forms and patterns that diverge from their counterparts in their dominant L2. The results also suggest that transfer effects are restricted to specific forms that are marked (e.g. broken plurals), infrequent (duals), or characterized by processing difficulty (as seems to be the case with the dependencies in the relative clauses). Moreover, transfer effects are intimately related to both the attrition and incomplete acquisition of the speakers’ knowledge of the four areas under study. The implications of the study for heritage language research are discussed.

This study compares Arabic L1, L2, and heritage speakers' (HS) knowledge of plural formation, which involves concatenative and nonconcatenative modes of derivation. Ninety participants (divided equally among L1, L2, and heritage speakers) completed two oral tasks: a picture naming task (to measure proficiency) and a plural formation task. The findings indicate that both L2 learners and heritage speakers have consistent problems with nonconcatenative plural morphology (particularly plurals with geminated and defective roots). However, the difficulties that heritage speakers displayed were mainly restricted to forms that are acquired late by L1 children, unlike L2 learners who displayed a sharp performance dichotomy between concatenative and nonconcatenative plurals. Furthermore, with regard to the default strategy, heritage speakers resorted to the language-specific default form, namely the sound feminine, whereas L2 learners opted for the sound masculine, which is likely a case of adhering to a universal tendency.