The Availability of Grammatical Skills in the Exercises of the Arabic Language Textbook for the Fifth Preparatory Grade: An Analytical Study

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the availability of grammatical thinking skills in the exercises of the Arabic Language Textbook for the fifth preparatory grade, Parts One and Two, and to examine the distribution and balance of their domains and indicators. The study adopted the descriptive content-analysis method. The research population and sample comprised all grammar exercises included in both parts of the textbook, covering fifteen grammatical topics. The research instrument was a content-analysis card based on the grammatical thinking skills identified by Al-Douri (2020), which were reorganized and adapted to suit the nature of the present study. The final version consisted of seven main domains and twenty-two sub-indicators. The independent grammatical task was adopted as the recording unit, while frequency was used as the counting unit. Frequencies, percentages, weighted percentages, and ranks were employed to analyze the data. The reliability coefficient was 0.91 for analysis over time and 0.89 for inter-coder agreement, with an overall mean of 0.90. The findings revealed a total of 698 occurrences: 342 in Part One and 356 in Part Two. Grammatical comprehension ranked first at 26.93%, followed by grammatical application at 21.63%, classification at 17.48%, judgment at 17.05%, analysis at 11.17%, interpretation at 3.15%, and inference at 2.58%. Fifteen out of the twenty-two skills were represented, whereas seven skills were entirely absent. The study concluded that although the two parts were quantitatively close, the distribution of grammatical thinking skills was qualitatively unbalanced. The exercises mainly emphasized comprehension, application, and grammatical parsing, while inference, interpretation, and evaluative skills received limited attention. The study recommended redesigning grammar exercises to ensure a balanced representation of grammatical thinking skills and increasing tasks based on analysis, justification, inference, and error correction.