Arabic Reading Texts Built for Your Students

About the Arabic Language

Speakers

About 411 million native speakers of all Arabic varieties and 70 million second-language users (2020–2024), according to the figures cited in Wikipedia's Arabic article.¹

Did you know?

Arabic is diglossic: Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) is the language of print, media, law and schooling, while people speak regional dialects in daily life. Modern Standard Arabic is generally not spoken as a first language.²

The main challenge

Verbs are built on a root of three or four consonants that carries the basic meaning, such as k-t-b 'write'; changing the vowels between the consonants and adding prefixes or suffixes marks tense, person and number.³

CEFR exams

• CIMA – Certificat international de maîtrise en arabe (Institut du monde arabe; Modern Standard Arabic, CEFR A1–C2)

Where students struggle

• Plurals of non-human nouns take feminine singular agreement, so 'the books are new' is الكُتُبُ جَدِيدَةٌ, with a feminine singular adjective. Learners often 'correct' it to a plural.⁴

Teaching notes

• Give A0 learners fully voweled text. Most Arabic is written without short-vowel marks (حركات), but books for children and learners mark them in full, so a beginner can sound out words they don't yet know.⁵

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_nouns_and_adjectives
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics

About the Arabic language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
6. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages

Arabic reading proficiency benchmarks (ACTFL)

Framework equivalents are approximate and describe reading. ACTFL publishes how its ratings correspond to CEFR levels, not the reverse, so treat this column as a rough guide rather than an official equivalence.

Reference corpora

Word-frequency work on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) draws on very large web corpora.

• arTenTen: Belinkov, Habash, Kilgarriff and colleagues (WACL 2013) crawled 5.8 billion words of Arabic from the web in 2012, removing duplicates. At the time of writing they were tokenising, lemmatising and tagging it with the MADA tool, and planned to study how much of it is Modern Standard Arabic and how much dialect.¹
• Register: Stichos writes Arabic readers in Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) at every level and avoids regional dialect vocabulary, idioms and colloquialisms, so learners and tutors work from one standard form.

1. https://www.muni.cz/en/research/publications/1125225

Readability design principles

Readability formulas designed for English need Arabic-specific adaptations. Two published examples:^1,2

• OSMAN: El-Haj and Rayson (2016) adapt Flesch- and Fog-style formulas with Arabic counts of short, long and stress syllables and a Faseeh factor for features of the script. It works on text with or without diacritics.¹
• AARI: Al Tamimi and colleagues (2014) built the Automatic Arabic Readability Index from 1,196 Jordanian school texts for grades 1 to 10, using character counts, average sentence length and average word length.²
• Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score.

1. https://aclanthology.org/L16-1038/
2. https://www.iajit.org/PDF/vol.11,no.4/5200.pdf

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Vowel marks: From A0 to B1 every word carries full vocalization (تشكيل: harakat, shadda, sukūn and tanwīn), and a line missing it is rewritten. From B2 the marks are no longer required.
• Tenses and moods: A0 uses only the present (المضارع). A1 adds the past (الماضي). A2 opens the general future (سوف and سـ) and basic negation. The subjunctive (المنصوب), the jussive (المجزوم) and the passive (المبني للمجهول) arrive at B1.
• The dual: The dual (المثنى) is left out at A0 and A1: two people are written as two singular sentences.
• Agreement: Non-human plurals take feminine singular agreement, as in الكُتُبُ جَدِيدَةٌ (“the books are new”).

Related academic & framework resources

• ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: ACTFL’s description of what learners can do in reading, listening, speaking and writing, from Novice to Distinguished.
• Assigning CEFR Ratings to ACTFL Assessments: How ACTFL ratings correspond to CEFR levels, in one direction only.
• OSMAN: A Novel Arabic Readability Metric: The LREC 2016 paper by Mahmoud El-Haj and Paul Rayson.
• AARI: Automatic Arabic Readability Index: The paper by Al Tamimi, Jaradat, Al-Jarrah and Ghanem in the International Arab Journal of Information Technology.
• arTenTen: A New, Vast Corpus for Arabic: The workshop paper that introduced the corpus, with its size, crawl date and processing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is included in the preview on this page?

You can try a free live story at the A0 or A1 level with tap-to-translate words and line-by-line translations. You can also join the Reading List to receive three free sample stories as a downloadable PDF preview.

How will I share stories with my students at launch?

At launch, you can share any story you create by sending your students a web link. There is no limit on how many share links you can create.

Do my students need an account to read the texts I share?

No, your students can open a shared story link directly in their web browser without making an account. They are invited to create a free account if they want to save their stories and saved vocabulary, but it is never required.

How does audio pronunciation and narration work for students?

At launch, students can tap a word in a shared text to hear a standard computer voice pronounce it. If you add the Premium Audio add-on at launch, students gain natural-sounding voices for word pronunciation, complete story narration with separate voices for different speakers in dialogues, and MP3 audio exports that you or your students can download.

Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio covers every level from A0 through B2. You can also paste your own vocabulary lists or turn specific verb tenses on or off so texts match what you have taught.

How are the Arabic stories generated and checked?

The texts are written by AI and automatically checked against grammar and vocabulary rules for the chosen level. Because this automated check is not a human editor, occasional errors can occur, so you should review a story before sending it to your students.

How does the platform handle Modern Standard Arabic and vowels for beginners?

Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) is the written standard used in media, books, and schooling across regions with over 400 million speakers, though it is rarely spoken as a native language. Because standard printed text omits short vowels, giving A0 learners fully voweled text (حركات) helps beginners sound out unfamiliar words while learning root patterns and non-human plural rules.