Comparing the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of written Arabic in the production of advanced learners and native speakers

This chapter explores the written performance of Arabic native speakers (NSs) and upper-level/advanced learners of Arabic via a presentation of descriptive statistics of a number of direct measures of written complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). It discusses that upper-level learners indeed resemble NSs in many ways, although NSs are shown to be more complex, accurate, and fluent writers. Issues of Arabic literacy and literacy development are of critical importance to Arabic learners, educators, and millions of native speakers. Instances of NS production that were coded as an error involved departures from the morpho-syntactic norms of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) rather than the use of colloquial lexical items or common spelling variants. The CAF framework is typically employed in relation to Skehan's trade-off hypothesis, in which learners are assumed to possess finite attentional resources available for devotion to either linguistic complexity, accuracy, or fluency in their L2 production.