Table 1 Adaptations made to the tasks of the TNL-2 in the Arabic version
Task | Original English version of TNL-2 | Adapted version of TNL-2 | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
McDonald’s story Tasks 1 and 2 | McDonald’s story | McDonald’s restaurant story | Even though McDonald’s is widely available across Egypt, some of the young children were not familiar with it in the pilot study. In the scoring section for narrative production in task 2 both ‘’restaurant’’ or ‘’McDonald’s’’ were counted as correct. |
Lisa and Raymound | Sara and Ahmed | Common Egyptian first names. | |
Chicken nuggets | Chicken | There is no Egyptian Arabic translation for Chicken nuggets. Chicken was used instead. | |
Large vanilla milk shake | Large juice | For those who were not familiar with McDonald’s, we found it more appropriate to use “juice” instead of “milkshake" which is a more common order at restaurants. | |
Shipwreck Task 3 | Shipwreck | Broken ship | The literal translation of Shipwreck is in Modern Standard Arabic, we found the translation to the Spoken Arabic form, an equivalent to "broken ship" easier to understand. |
Maria | Mariam | A common name in Egypt. | |
On the weekend (Saturday/Sunday) | On the weekend (Friday/Saturday) | The days of the weekend were changed in accordance with the days of the weekend in Egypt (Friday and Saturday) | |
Monday | Sunday | The answer to the question “when did Maria take her ship to school’’ was changed to Sunday which is the first school day of the week in Egypt | |
A | A or full mark | The grading system is different among the Egyptian schools. Grading using numerical marks is more common in Egyptian national schools. During scoring of the comprehension questions, both A or full mark such as 10/10 were counted as correct. | |
Late for school Task 4 | No changes were done to adapt the story, it was found culturally appropriate. | ||
Treasure Task 5 | Erika and Michael | Rana and Karim | Common Egyptian first names. |
Michael snuck up behind a large rock | Karim hid behind a large rock | The translation of the expression “snuck up” is not commonly used in Spoken Arabic. | |
Rolled their eyes | They found it strange and laughed | The literal translation of the expression ”rolled their eyes” is not commonly used to show annoyance in Egyptian Arabic. We found it more appropriate that they expressed their disbelief by finding it strange and laughable. | |
Aliens Task 6 | No changes were done to the original version. |