(Mis) reading-Correction Strategies in the Classroom Revisited: The Case of ɣazalil-banāt (the flirtation of girls) Movie

This paper focuses only on one particular scene of the famous Egyptian movie, entitled ɣazalil-banāt (the flirtation of girls) (1949), starring Nagīb al-Rīḥāny and a pop star, Layla Murād, that is, the protagonist's long speech with his pupils in the classroom. Humorously, this scene shows how misreading a sentence or an utterance, due to (1) one-letter substitution neighbors, as in al-ɣayṭ/al-ɣayẓ - yaḥtāl/yaxtāl; (2) diacritics, as in wayalukk/wayluk; and (3) softness and hardness of sounds, as in ʔăḅḷăh/ʔablah, as recurring themes throughout the scene, results in misunderstanding, on the part of the pupils, and laughter, on the part of the viewer. The purpose of this study is to examine the misreading-correction techniques adopted by the teacher in the classroom, targeting the primary school pupils as main participants, who were randomly selected and assigned to the analysis, and focusing purposefully on the errors of oral reading. Additionally, it attempts to investigate the various types of the pupils' disruptive behavior inside the classroom and the teacher's educational policy and rational management of disruptive pupils. Furthermore, this paper analyzes various issues related to sociolinguistics, such as visual community, language variations and social interaction, using Verbal Efficiency Theory (VET) (Perfetti & Lesgold, 1979), which enables readers, especially novice pupils in the class to recognize and identify words efficiently; to read fluently; and to decode new words skillfully.