Abstract
<p>Descriptive linguistics settled the question decades ago: Arabic is not two codes but a graded continuum of registers, and educated speakers live in its middle. Adult second-language teaching absorbed the insight, and integrated curricula that teach dialect alongside the standard are now an established movement. Early first-language literacy never received the same translation. Curricula across the Arab world still select one target register, fence it, and treat the rest of the child's repertoire as absence. This paper carries the continuum into early literacy design. It states the framework's six structural claims, separating what is inherited from Badawi, Hary, and the educated-spoken-Arabic tradition from what is proposed here: that register layers remain co-active during literacy acquisition, and that the root-and-pattern system links them through learnable correspondence rules rather than surface identity. Five design principles follow, worked through the United Arab Emirates, whose compressed register ecology and mixed-nationality classrooms provide both the strongest case for the framework and its hardest test. The ideological standing of the standard register and the equity risks of profiling children by home variety are treated as first-order design constraints, not afterthoughts. Three falsifiable predictions are stated with the discriminating comparisons that would test them against graded-distance and separate-systems accounts, together with pre-specified abandonment conditions. No efficacy data are reported.</p>