Effects of exposure to literary Arabic on reading comprehension in a diglossic situation

Reading difficulties in Arabic in elementary schoolare usually attributed to the diglossia of the Arabiclanguage, whereby the spoken language is totallydifferent from literary Arabic, the language of booksand school instruction. Educators, teachers, andparents still believe that exposure of young Arabicspeakers to literary Arabic in the preschool period isa burden for them, and is not useful. The presentpost hoc study examined the influence of exposure toliterary Arabic of preschool children on their readingcomprehension of literary Arabic stories in grades 1and 2. Participants in the study were 282children, 135 from grade 1 and 147 from grade 2. Ofthe participants, 144 constituted the experimentalgroup, and were exposed to literary Arabic throughouttheir preschool period. The 138 participants of thecontrol group were exposed not to literary but tospoken Arabic during that period. These children weretested for reading comprehension at the end of grade1 and grade 2 and compared with the control group. The results generally indicate better readingcomprehension results for the children who wereexposed to literary Arabic than for the children whowere exposed only to spoken Arabic.     

Perceived educational values of Omani school principals

This qualitative study investigated the perceived educational values of Omani school principals. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview form which focused on the core values of school administration as perceived by a sample of 44 school principals; a focus group interview was also held. Data were analysed using Nvivo software. The study results classified the perceived values of Omani school principals into three categories of values based on Hodgkinson’s classification. The most coded values of the principals were cooperation, devotion/genuineness (organizational loyalty, eagerness to learn), respect (self, other, mutual), commitment, responsibility and citizenship, all of which fell into the category of consensus and consequences. A citrus model is proposed to give a visual image of the composition of the three categories of values in school administration. While this study identified a number of educational values, the process by which school principals can activate these values in daily school practices still needs to be clarified.     

Economic costs and benefits of educating foreign students in the United States

In recent years some western European countries have adopted restrictive rationing/pricing policies to regulate the accelerated inflow of foreign students. There is no such policy in the U.S. If the current trends continue the population of foreign students in the U.S. may reach one million or so by 1990. In view of their large and rapidly expanding number, it is of some interest to study the economics of their education. An attempt is made here to estimate the economic costs and economic benefits to the U.S. of educating foreign students. It should be emphasized at the outset that the conceptual and data problems have made it impossible to estimate some economic costs and benefits, thereby constraining the comprehensiveness of the overall estimates.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 47th Annual Meeting, Midwest Economics Association, St. Louis, Missouri, April 1983.