Reading in the UAE and in more than one language

National policy: the Year of Reading, the law and the plan

According to a UAE federal ministry page, 2016 was declared the Year of Reading by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, with the aim of cultivating a culture of reading in the country. The Ministry says the year included more than 1,500 initiatives across sectors. It also describes a ten-year National Plan for Reading meant to help people make reading a habit and a lifestyle by 2026, and an AED 100 million allocation, funded by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, for reading-related activities by NGOs and volunteer groups through 2026.^[1]

The same page says the National Law of Reading treats reading as a cultural value. It describes provisions requiring entities to provide reading materials in public places such as malls and coffee shops, and directing schools and universities to strengthen their libraries. March has been the Month of Reading each year since 2017. These are descriptions of policy and programmes. The sources opened for this guide do not report whether the 2026 targets have been met, and the legal text of the law itself was not accessible, so details should be checked against it.^[1]

What the figures show

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2021 was conducted in 57 countries and eight benchmarking entities. The UAE Ministry of Education reports that UAE students, tested in the fifth grade, averaged 483 points, 33 points more than in PIRLS 2016. The sample was 27,448 students from 663 public and private schools. The Ministry also reports that scores rose by 7 per cent at the advanced and high levels and fell by 7 per cent at the low level, in its own phrasing. The study organisers caution that results should be interpreted with care because of the pandemic, and note general downward trends across participating systems.^[2][3]

For reading habits, the main figure found is from the 2016 Arab Reading Index, reported by Khaleej Times. It placed the UAE fourth among 22 Arab nations surveyed, with an overall score of 82 per cent and about 51 hours of reading a year per reader, from a survey of 148,000 respondents. This describes readers generally, not children specifically, and it is a newspaper account rather than the index report itself. The article's book counts are internally inconsistent, so they are not reproduced here. The sources opened did not give an official UAE figure for how often young children are read to at home.^[4]

Reading at home and the languages of the UAE

A 2025 policy brief from Emirates College for Advanced Education states that parent-child home reading is not a traditional practice in the UAE and that reading attainment is below international standards for children attending state schools. It notes that a strong oral culture remains a feature of Emirati society. The brief reports on a project in eight public-school kindergartens in Abu Dhabi, where 80 fathers of children aged four to six attended workshops and were given picture books to read at home. Its recommendations include guidance on choosing diverse, contemporary, culturally relevant picture books, nationwide reading workshops for mothers and fathers, and closer school-home liaison.^[5]

The brief also describes the language setting: the Emirati population speaks a Gulf Arabic dialect, and children learn Modern Standard Arabic for literacy and formal purposes at school, as well as English, which is both a subject and the language of teaching for some subjects. One 2024 study of 139 Israeli-Palestinian kindergartners found vocabulary and story understanding were significantly higher after a story intervention, and that stories told entirely in spoken Arabic were the most effective. Those children were in Israel, not the UAE, and the project was small, so it is relevant to Emirati families only by analogy.^[5][6]

Learning to read in more than one language

A critical review of young dual language learners by Hammer and colleagues (2014) found that these children have two separate language systems early in life, and that the amount of exposure to and use of each language appears to play a key role. During the preschool years their vocabulary in each language appears lower than that of monolingual peers, but there is some evidence that they catch up to monolinguals over time. The authors describe much of the evidence as preliminary.^[7]

A meta-analysis by Melby-Lervåg and Lervåg (2014) compared second-language with first-language learners and found a medium-sized deficit in reading comprehension and a large deficit in language comprehension, but only small differences in phonological awareness; the authors suggest that interventions should focus on language comprehension skills. A 2023 systematic review of 50 studies reports that home literacy practices predict bilingual children's reading, that strong readers in one language tend to be strong in another, and that biliterates are mostly facilitated when their two writing systems are similar. Because Arabic and English use different scripts, how far skills transfer between them is a question these sources do not settle, and most of the studies reviewed involve English as one of the languages.^[8][9]