I am ashamed to say that part of the problem was very obvious, but did not occur to me at first. Vowels, those five important letters on which our entire language seems to hang, are not necessary to reading in Arabic; in fact many people don't even write them, it is the consonants that help you read. Once I remembered this fact, the way to help my students became obvious: they needed phonics instruction, and a lot of it. After I did some direct and explicit instruction on the importance of vowels, and how it is we change them from short to long, my students began to show greater improvements in their reading. The problem then became finding a program that taught phonics, but used reading materials interesting enough to engage my middle school learners.
Unfortunately I did not find the perfect answer to this problem. I did stumble upon a phonics-based spelling program though, and used this as a jumping off point for developing my own reading scope and sequence for the year. I combed the libraries and resources of my early childhood education peers, read everything I could get my hands on relating to word families, and dove into the wonderful world of Google search results with every spare minute. The result was a phonics-based reading curriculum that, combined with a lot of explanation about why vowels are important and how they help you read better, engaged my students and resulted in amazing growth rates.
This search actually became the basis of an action research project for one of my grad classes, and the paper is available below. Once I began selling my resources on Teachers Pay Teachers and other sites, my word family things were one of the first to be posted. Thankfully it has been a little over a year since I had a student who needed this level of reading instruction, but the students who were my "guinea pigs" as I developed it still talk about that year as the turn-around for them and reading. While it was developed for use with older students, it is based off the principles and methods common to the lower grades and I believe would be very successful for them as well.
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