Testing whether a child is really reading Arabic

Four tests, none of which take more than a minute, that tell you whether your child is reading Arabic or reproducing something they have heard.

Most parents find out by accident. A child who has been going to madrasah for three years opens the Mushaf at a page nobody has covered, and nothing comes out. It is a horrible moment, and it is far more common than anyone admits.

Why the gap happens in the first place


Group classes reward the sound of fluency. Twenty children reciting together, one teacher listening for obvious mistakes, and the fastest way for a child to keep up is to learn what the page sounds like rather than what the letters actually say. It works well enough to pass, week after week, until the page changes.

There is nothing wrong with the child and nothing dishonest about it. Memory is doing exactly what memory is built to do. The problem is that decoding, the skill of turning letters and harakat into sound, never got built underneath it. Decoding is the part that transfers to every page they will ever open. A proper Noorani Qaida foundation is what usually prevents this, which is why the gap shows up most often in children who were moved past it quickly.

Before you start

  • A Mushaf, or any Qaida with harakat printed
  • Two minutes when nobody else is in the room
  • A completely neutral face. This matters more than the tests themselves

Do not announce that you are testing anything. The moment a child understands they are being assessed, you stop measuring reading and start measuring nerves.

Test 1: The unfamiliar page

Open the Mushaf somewhere your child has never studied. The middle juz are usually safe. Ask them to read one line.

Reading: slow, careful, sounding out. Memory: freezing, guessing, or starting from a familiar verse nearby.

Watch the eyes rather than the mouth. A child who is decoding tracks left along the line in small movements and pauses at difficult words. A child who is retrieving from memory tends to look at the page in general, or slightly away from it, because the page is not where the information is coming from.

Speed is the other tell. Genuine first time reading of an unfamiliar page is slower than recitation of a memorised one, and it should be. If the unfamiliar page comes out at the same pace as Surah Al Fatiha, something is not adding up.

Test 2: The middle of the line

Point at a single word in the middle of a line and ask them to read just that word.

This is the most revealing test of the four. Children who recite from memory cannot start mid line, because the sound they have stored runs from the beginning. They will usually go back to the start of the verse, and that tells you what you need to know.

Try it three or four times on different lines before you draw a conclusion. One failure can be nerves. A consistent pattern of returning to the start of the verse is not nerves, it is how the information is stored.

Test 3: Backwards

Ask them to read a line word by word, from the last word to the first.

Odd, and children usually find it funny, which is helpful. It completely removes the ability to rely on memory or rhythm, because the stored sound only runs in one direction.

A child who can decode will find this slow but manageable. A child who cannot will stall almost immediately, or will read the line forwards and then look confused about what you asked. Keep it light. The laughter is doing useful work here, because it lowers the stakes.

Test 4: The nonsense word

Write three or four letters with harakat that do not form a real word. The teacher can do this, or you can copy letter shapes from a Qaida.

A child who can decode will read it. A child who cannot will look for a real word it resembles and read that instead. This is the same test used in English phonics screening in UK primary schools, for exactly the same reason: it is the only way to separate decoding from recognition.

If your child has done phonics at school, they may even recognise the format and relax into it. Sets of Arabic alphabet worksheets are useful here, because they let you build nonsense combinations from letters your child has already been taught rather than random shapes.

Reading the results together


Four tests, three broad outcomes.

Passes all four

Your child is reading. Slowly, probably, and with mistakes, but the mechanism is there and it will speed up with mileage. What they need now is volume and accuracy work, which is what Tajweed classes are for once decoding is secure.

Passes one or two

Partial decoding. This is the most common result, and usually means your child knows the letters and the short vowels but has not automated them, so under any pressure they fall back on memory. It is a practice problem more than a teaching problem, and it responds quickly.

Passes none

Your child is reciting, not reading. This is not a disaster and it is not wasted time. It does mean the next few months need to look different from the last few years.

If your child fails these

They are not lazy and they have not wasted their time. They learned by the method they were taught, which in a large group rewards fluent sounding recitation over accurate decoding.

It is fixable, usually in two to four months of one to one work. The route back is unglamorous: return to the Qaida, rebuild letter and harakat recognition until it is automatic, then move to short unfamiliar passages. Parents often resist this because it feels like going backwards. It is not. A course in Quran reading for beginners covers exactly this ground and moves faster with an older child, because the child already knows what the letters sound like and only needs to connect them to the shapes.

Expect the first three weeks to feel slow and slightly humiliating for the child, then a noticeable jump. That jump is the point at which decoding starts becoming automatic, and almost every child who sticks with it reaches it.

Do this quietly

Not as a test, and not in front of anyone. Frame it as curiosity, "read me this bit", and do not comment on the result in the moment. A child who realises they have been caught out will resist the very thing that fixes it.

Do not repeat the findings to relatives, and do not use them in an argument about practice. If practice is already a friction point in your house, the approach in our guide on getting a child to practise without arguing is worth reading before you change anything at all.

What to say to the teacher

Be specific and unemotional. "He cannot start from the middle of a line" is a piece of information a teacher can act on. "I do not think he can read" is not, and tends to make people defensive.

A good teacher will already suspect it and will be relieved someone said it out loud. If the response is that your child is doing fine and there is nothing to look at, ask how progress is actually measured. Our note on tracking progress sets out what a straight answer looks like, and the list of questions to ask an online Quran academy covers what to raise if you are considering a change.

Retest every few months

The same four tests show progress clearly. A child who could not start mid line in September and can in February has gained something real, and it is worth telling them so.

Three months is a sensible gap. Any more often and you are measuring noise, any less often and you will miss a stall. Keep a one line note of the date and what happened, because memory of the last attempt is unreliable and progress in reading is slow enough to be invisible day to day.

Mistakes parents make with these tests

  • Running all four in one sitting. Two is plenty for one evening. Four in a row feels like an interrogation
  • Choosing a page that is too hard. Unfamiliar is the requirement, not difficult. A dense page with unusual words tests vocabulary, not decoding
  • Correcting during the test. You are gathering information, not teaching. Corrections change the behaviour you are trying to observe
  • Testing at 8.30pm. A tired child fails everything, and you will draw the wrong conclusion
  • Acting on one result. Look for the pattern across all four before deciding anything

Common questions

My child is six. Are these tests fair?


Tests 1 and 2 are fine from around six, once a child has been through the alphabet with harakat. Tests 3 and 4 are better left until seven or eight, because they need a bit more working memory. If your child is younger than that and cannot decode yet, that is simply where they are in the process.

Does this mean memorisation is a bad idea?

No. Memorisation is valuable and children are very good at it. The concern is only about memorisation standing in for reading, because a child who cannot decode is limited to whatever someone has recited to them. Build both, and keep an eye on which one is doing the work.

My child reads Arabic at school but not the Mushaf

Usually a script and layout issue rather than a reading issue. Mushaf typography, the lack of spacing conventions they are used to, and the density of the page can all throw a child who reads modern printed Arabic comfortably. Work on Arabic reading and writing alongside Mushaf practice and the two usually converge within a term.

How long should this take to fix?

Two to four months of consistent one to one work for most children, assuming three or four short sessions a week. Children who are older tend to move faster, not slower, because the ear is already trained. For a sense of the timeline from the beginning, our piece on how long Noorani Qaida takes gives realistic figures.

Related reading

If you would like a teacher to run these checks properly and tell you where your child actually is, that is what a first lesson is for. See how our lessons work.