Discourse Skills Measure (DSM) ( Makhoul & Ibrahim, 2012 )

Introductory conversation

The children were asked to answer a series of questions addressing their families, preferences and hobbies.

Picture description

The children were presented with a picture and were asked to describe it.

Storytelling

The children were required to tell a story, following the presented picture.

Listening Comprehension Measure (LCM) ( Makhoul & Ibrahim, 2012 )

Story comprehension

After listening to a story twice, a story recall-task was followed (Short-Term Recall).

Then, they were asked to answer orally a series of comprehension questions and were ultimately asked to recall the story after 20 min delay (Long-Term Recall).

The story recall and answers were assessed by indices of Makhoul (2006) .

Instructions’ comprehension

Nine items were included in this task, requesting the children to follow the tester’s instructions. For example: “draw a kite above the longer pen”.

Sentence-picture matching

The children were required to choose the sentence that best describes the presented picture (out of five sentences read by the tester).

Arabic Phonological Awareness Measure (APAM) ( Makhoul & Ibrahim, 2012 )

All the used tasks were adapted to Arabic based on the Reading Readiness Screening Tool (RRST) developed by Learning Disabilities Association of Alberta (2009) .

Auditory Word detection

Five sentences were presented. The children were asked to count the number of the heard words following each sentence by using their finger.

Syllable Detection

The children were asked to map the number of syllables appearing in a heard word by “clapping” each syllable out.

Phoneme detection

The children were asked to sound the heard phonemes in the presented words. Due to their insufficient sensitivity to short vowels when blended with consonant sounds, they were only evaluated for their capacity to map consonant sounds.

For example, the word “كَتَبَ” (/kataba/) consists of 3 consonants and 3 short vowels (/a/) represented by the diacritical mark fatħa (ــَـ).

Rhyme generation

The task requires generating a rhyming word with previously sounded target words or pseudo-words.

Standard Arabic Morphological Awareness (SAMA) Adapted and revised from Abu-Ahmed (2008)

Morphological awareness

The task assesses awareness to word morphological structure in written Arabic. Each item includes a pair of real and pseudo words, allowing assessment of the different aspects of inflectional structures in Arabic (gender, tense, number, person and mood). The children are asked to select the word with the corresponding morphological structure.

Test of Receptive Oral Grammar Adapted to Modern Standard Arabic from Bishop (1994)

T.R.O.G

The children were presented with four pictures and were asked to select the picture corresponding to the heard word or sentence. The test includes 20 syntactic categories (e.g. negative form, adjectives, comparison forms, passive forms…).

Arabic Vocabulary Measure (AVM) ( Makhoul & Ibrahim, 2012 )

Expressive Vocabulary

The test consists of two parts. The first part includes 15 items, requiring the children to name the presented pictures. In the second part, the children are asked to point to the picture that corresponds to the heard word.

Generalization

The children were asked to draw a line between each pair belonging to the same category.

Odd Word Out

Four pictures were presented and the children were instructed to draw a circle around the picture that doesn’t belong and to justify their answer.

Story Sequencing

The children were presented with 4 pictures and were asked to sequence the pictures in the correct order, to create a story and tell it.