Arabic Students Are Not Failing the Test. The Test Is Failing Them.

The exam, which was entirely in al Fusha, or Modern Standard Arabic, MSA, was a piece of cake for him; he pointed out that the only thing he got wrong was when the computer would not let him drag and drop the word to the answer box.

This exam is a big deal to students finishing fifth grade at his school because it will be used to sort the students into different levels of Arabic for the first time. Up until now, all students of the same grade were in the same Arabic class, regardless of level and whether the child was a heritage speaker, like my son, or not. Going forward, all the middle school children will be grouped by level, not grade.

My son then proceeded to tell me how the other students had done, mainly to highlight who would be in the same level next fall. The names he mentioned were completely unsurprising: they were all heritage speakers like himself with a couple of non-heritage speakers who always got straight A’s.

That was the first sign that the test was not telling the full story. It confirmed who already had Arabic in their lives outside the classroom, but it did not explain what kind of Arabic each student actually knew, how they used it, or what support they would need next.

When a placement test sees only formal Arabic, it can shape a student’s path based on an incomplete picture. That affects not only which class they enter, but also how teachers understand their strengths, gaps, confidence, and next steps.

What Are We Really Assessing?

My son’s score was not meaningless, but it was not very revealing either. It confirmed what his classmates, teachers, and parents already knew: children who hear and speak Arabic at home usually perform differently from children encountering Arabic primarily in school.

The problem is not assessment itself, but rather that many placement exams measure only al Fusha while ignoring the dialect knowledge, oral fluency, and home language exposure that shape how students actually learn.

Arabic exists across a continuum that includes al Fusha and many spoken dialects. For many children, the dialect they hear and use at home is their first lived experience of Arabic, while al Fusha is often learned through school, books, media, religious learning, and formal settings. Arabic assessments focusing only on al Fusha can therefore ignore a student’s spoken or home variety of Arabic, even if they understand or speak it fluently at home.

Recognizing dialect as part of students’ Arabic knowledge does not diminish the importance of al Fusha, including its literary, cultural, and religious significance. Rather, it helps teachers understand the full range of Arabic knowledge students bring into the classroom.

Al Fusha, being the formal register, is usually limited in context (Merlo, 2025), and testing only in al Fusha fails to evaluate what ACTFL calls the World Readiness Standards: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities (ACTFL, 2022). The ironic result is that these exams often sort students by a skill they do not directly assess: home gained knowledge in a spoken variety of Arabic.

In other words, the issue is not that heritage students are succeeding unfairly. The issue is that the assessment sees only part of their Arabic and then uses that partial picture to make decisions about placement, pacing, and instruction.

Knowing Where Students Begin

Arabic is not the only language where heritage learners enter classrooms with uneven and complex skills. Other language programs have already begun designing placement systems that account for this.

Research shows that heritage speakers generally score higher on placement tests than non-native speakers (Brown & Thompson, 2020). Knowing that heritage speakers perform differently, Spanish language placement exams differentiate between native, heritage, and non-native speakers, which allows curricula to target each cohort’s needs (Moreno & Garrett Rucks, 2021).

It seems like an obvious thing to try to do: to know the optimal route to get to your destination, you need to know your starting point.

Of course, heritage speakers are not all the same. Some children speak Arabic fluently at home, while others understand only fragments, and some have stronger religious or literary exposure than conversational ability. That is precisely why assessment needs to be more nuanced, not less.

In many schools, however, Arabic teachers and programs are working with limited time, staffing, and assessment resources. As a result, some schools may not have the tools they need to conduct a fuller initial assessment of students. One teacher with whom I spoke said that for a placement exam her school just gives students a text in al Fusha and asks them comprehension and vocabulary questions. She added that many heritage students can pass the test with high marks even if their writing ability is weak.

At some schools, teachers may not know that they have students who speak an Arabic dialect fluently. This means those students’ existing Arabic skills may not always be recognized or intentionally built into instruction. Although many programs prioritize al Fusha and exclude dialects, it is often a child’s foundation in a dialect that makes success in al Fusha possible.

This is where placement becomes more than a scheduling issue. If assessment does not capture what students bring with them, it can place them into tracks that reflect background exposure more than instructional need. Heritage students may move ahead because of unrecognized strengths, while other students may be judged against a standard that does not fully explain what they can or cannot yet do.

When Dialect Becomes a Testing Penalty

This brings us back to the fact that the current Arabic placement test is not telling us anything we do not know. At another school, a teacher asked me why students, once they take an Arabic placement exam and are sorted into different levels, never advance to a “higher” level.

The answer seemed obvious to me: students’ background with Arabic plays a large role in the exam results. Once they are sorted into levels, each class continues at a certain trajectory. The advanced class, often filled with heritage speakers, progresses more quickly because it can take advantage of students’ ability with Arabic dialects while never actually acknowledging or evaluating that ability in a formal way.

The problem is no longer just that dialect is invisible. In some assessments, dialect is treated as something students must suppress.

To overcome these issues, Arabic placement exams need to take into consideration the relationship between al Fusha and dialects. Even recently developed assessment tests that are designed for children, such as the STAMP, only focus on al Fusha. The STAMP test for elementary school children specifically reminds students to use al Fusha and avoid dialect because it may lower their score. Given the differences between dialects themselves, there also needs to be a way to understand the Arabic background of a student of Moroccan heritage differently from one of Syrian heritage.

This is how an assessment can fail students: not by giving them a low score, but by missing the Arabic they already carry and the support they actually need.

Moreover, rather than a one time Arabic placement process that produces a single score, there needs to be regular assessment of students throughout the Arabic journey: Can the student understand spoken Arabic? In which dialect or dialects? Can the student speak comfortably? Can they decode Arabic script? Can they read formal Arabic? Can they write? Do they know Qur’anic vocabulary, conversational vocabulary, or both?

These questions would help teachers place students according to actual instructional need rather than a blunt “advanced” or “beginner” label. However, in many schools Arabic assessment is left largely to individual teachers, who are often overworked teaching multiple classes and have little time to develop regular assessment tools.

Wa Halla’ Le Wayn? Where Do We Go Now?

There is no escaping the fact that natural language is necessary for empowering children in a language. While it might seem overwhelming to teachers to have to think about multiple dialects, there is a growing body of knowledge about how to work with a multiglossic classroom. For those interested in some of the latest academic research, check out Arabic as One Language: Integrating Dialect in the Arabic Language Curriculum (Al Batal, 2017).

School administrations can help Arabic teachers learn and integrate new techniques by giving them time and funding to attend teacher trainings and develop new learning tools.

Arabic placement and assessment exams should do more than confirm which children already hear Arabic at home. They should help teachers understand what each student can actually do: understand, speak, read, write, and move between dialect and al Fusha.

That requires better tools, better training, and a willingness to treat dialect not as a problem to hide, but as a resource to build on.

If we want students to grow in Arabic, our assessments need to stop asking them to leave part of their Arabic at the door.

Interested in learning more about multiglossia? Listen to the author share more insights on the fourth episode of Season Two of QFI’s podcast, All Things Arabic, titled “From the Classroom to Real Life: Navigating Arabic Multiglossia.”

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Qatar Foundation International (QFI). While QFI reviews guest contributions for clarity and to ensure the content is valuable for our audience, the accuracy and completeness of the information are the responsibility of the author.

References

ACTFL. (2022, September 7). World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. ACTFL. https://www.actfl.org/educator-resources/world-readiness-standards-for-learning-languages

Al Batal, M. (Ed.). (2017). Arabic as One Language. Georgetown University Press.

Brown, A. V., & Thompson, G. L. (2020). How foreign are the Spanish advanced placement world language exams? The case of ethnicity, bilinguality, and heritage learner candidates. Hispania, 103(2), 181–198. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpn.2020.0031

Merlo, V. (2025, July 8). Preparing Students for Native Non native Arabic Conversation. https://www.qfi.org/blog/preparing-students-for-native-non-native-arabic-conversation-2025

Moreno, O., & Garrett Rucks, P. (2021). Identifying and placing Spanish heritage speakers: One program’s placement test approach. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1293959.pdf