Exploring the Impact of Family Socio-Economic Status on Children’s Bilingual Abilities Among Arab Families

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript. I found it to be an interesting read, but I have several concerns that need to be addressed to strengthen the quality and clarity of your work.

1. Introduction Section:
   The introduction lacks coherence. While the main points are discussed, they are not sufficiently connected to form a logical flow. Additionally, it would be beneficial to reference relevant studies in your field, such as Farangi & Mehrpour (2022, 2024) and Farangi & Naami (2024), which are directly related to your research. Furthermore, the introduction contains an excessive number of subtitles, which disrupts the narrative flow. Consider consolidating or reorganizing these sections for better readability.

2. Participant Selection:
   The rationale for selecting participants exclusively from private schools is unclear. Given that children from private schools typically come from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, this could significantly bias your results. Please justify this decision and consider discussing the implications of excluding participants from public schools.

3. Instrument Validation:
   The manuscript does not provide sufficient details on how the instruments used in your study were validated. Please include a clear explanation of the validation process to ensure the reliability and validity of your measures.

4. Procedure:
   The procedure section requires more clarity. Please provide a detailed and step-by-step explanation of the methodology to allow for reproducibility and a better understanding of your study design.

5. Results Section:

   • The results are overly concise and lack sufficient elaboration. While tables are useful, they should be accompanied by a thorough interpretation and discussion of the findings.

   • In the first line of the results, you mention that 10 parents did not report family income. This statement is unclear and requires clarification.

   • The omission of fathers' education level as an independent variable is not justified. Please explain why this variable was excluded and discuss its potential impact on the study's outcomes.

   • The differential impact of family income on English learning versus Arabic learning is intriguing but unexplained. Similarly, the role of mothers' education level in this context is not addressed. These points warrant further discussion to provide a more comprehensive understanding of your findings.

These concerns are critical and must be addressed thoroughly before the manuscript can proceed further in the review process. I look forward to your revised submission.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I have only few observations: Rewrite you abstract to bring more clarity with respect to your research design, and which statistic test were employed. Provide intext citation to line 42 "several Studies". In line 144 rewrite the "in one or two days" as two days. I think you should try to make it's contribution to the existing literature more logical and compact. I feel something is missing as it needs substantial contribution. Try to make it more significant. 

The researcher should add a separate section to the ethical consideration carried out in this research. Only adding one line will not work? 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study addresses the lack of research on the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on bilingual language and literacy abilities in primary school children in an Arab society by examining how mothers’ and fathers’ education levels and family income influence Arabic-English bilingual children’s oral language and reading skills in the UAE. The researchers hypothesize that SES factors affect bilingual language and literacy development, with a stronger influence on L2 than L1 and a greater impact from mothers’ education compared to fathers’ education.
Although, generally speaking, the roles of mothers and fathers in a family vary depending on the family's cultural background, traditionally, mothers spend more time with their children and therefore may have a stronger influence on their development. This is why the first language a child acquires is often referred to as the "mother tongue." Naturally, family attitudes play a crucial role, and these attitudes, in turn, are shaped by the family's SES. This article makes an important contribution to understanding multilingualism in the Arabic-speaking world.
It would be interesting to explore the relationship between the development of the first and second languages, as there is a possibility that linguistic ability significantly affects proficiency in all languages.
In discussion, you say, Our finding is also similar to the finding of Maluch’s (2022) study which showed that the frequency of using the target language at home, number of books at home, preschool attendance, and school SES predicted students’ reading achievement in English but not in Arabic. Where are these results demonstrated?
It is also important to consider how well each parent speaks English and whether they can assist their child in learning it (although, of course, the primary school level does not require a particularly high proficiency in a foreign language). The study appears to confirm that the examined factors do have an influence, but they do not fully determine a child’s academic success. The theory of academic achievement lists many other factors that affect learning outcomes, and it would be interesting to explore which of them are relevant in this case. It would be helpful if the authors demonstrated more connections between different factors and commented on them. Naturally, the higher a person’s level of education, the more they can support their child, though this also requires specific learning and teaching strategies. Busy parents may not have enough time for child-rearing. 
Of course, everybody must study at the highest level possible. Is the article suggesting that girls and women must pursue extensive education—at the very least, to ensure that their children acquire strong English skills?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

It seems that English needs some corrections, like here: p. 2, should be: For example, Butler’s (2014) study conducted among Chinese children learning English found that parents with higher SES were more likely to adapt their support according to their children’s needs and create opportunities to use English outside school, thereby promoting their children’s confidence and motivation to learn English.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper seems acceptable. However, some improvments in the methods section seems to the point. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Can be improved

Author Response

Comment 1: Data analysis section is very brief. We need further information regarding the descriptive and inferential statistics used and the software for analyses.

Response 1:

Thank you for this comment. We provided more details of the data analyses, including the software and each step of doing data analysis. Please see the words with grey bottom in the section of Data Analyses.

 

Comment 2: The instruments are described. However, they are not validated.

Response 2: 

Thank you for this comment. We now have provided more details for the validity of the language tasks. As the items of these language tasks directly test the target language abilities, the face validity of these tasks is ensured. For example, we asked children to read words and calculated the accuracy of reading each word to test word reading accuracy. The same for the other language tasks.

All these tasks have been well established and valid. The BPVS-II and TROG-2 have already been standardised and are one of the most commonly used tools to test vocabulary and grammatical comprehension. The reliability and validity of these measures have been confirmed in different populations (e.g., Bishop, 2003; Carthery-Goulart et al., et al., 2022; Dunn et al., 1997; Kazemi et al., 2012).

The scores on all the language tasks were normally distributed as indicated by the skewness scores (Please see Table 1).

We additionally checked the correlation patterns of the language tasks to ensure the concurrent validity of these tasks. The results (Table 2) show that the concurrent validity of these measures was excellent, as what should be correlated theoretically were indeed correlated (and what should not be correlated were not correlated).

Please refer to the Sections of Measures and Procedures, Data Analyses, and Results. Our revision is marked with the grey bottom.