What an amazing class! That was my response to the Arabic lesson, to the students who participated, and the teacher who led the lesson. Before watching the class, I contacted one of my friends in the Arabic class to borrow her Arabic book. I looked over the book and found that it focuses a lot on grammar more than oral communicative skills. There were two set of books. The large book focuses on the Arabic metalanguage terminology. Also, it seems to adopt an Egyptian dialect over others. The smaller book is the book for beginners. It primarily focuses on the Arabic alphabets.
In class, the teacher begins by talking to the students on general topics for a brief amount of time. Later, they begin watching a movie about a girl named Maha. Maha is an Egyptian female college student. In the clip, she was using photos to introduce her family to us. For this activity, the students were asked to write down the sentences in Arabic. Then, the teacher asked the students to move around and check each other's answers. The students compared their answers as the teacher check the students' homework. What a bright way to manage time!
Afterward, the class as a whole discusses the answers and translated the sentences. The video was played several times to check accuracy. The approach that the teacher adopted in regard to translation was in the form of wh-questions. Instead of saying "what this word means?" he would say "how many uncles does Maha have?" with these questions, the students are not merely translating the sentences, they are thinking critically of what she is saying. Like French, Arabic is gendered, which is quite different from English. Here is where I was astonished to see the students master the difference between feminine words and masculine words. Having studied French, I always hated differentiating between words due to gender because it was hard for me to distinguish which is which. However, in French, articles were so important, and if I did not know the gender of the word, I may give it the wrong article. My favorite articles of all time in the French language were "les" and "l'" because they were not gendered. So, YES, I really admire these students for learning such a difficult language.
That short clip opened a can full of grammatical roles and new concepts for these students--which I find extremely well because now they get the meaning since they know the roots of the words, and they need to get the grammatical concept behind it. The teacher introduced possessive pronouns to them, which are completely different from the English or the French possessive pronouns. However, from their exposure to Arabic in the past couple weeks; they were able to identify many of them. I was surprised! They did not study it before--it only comes up in the examples. Yet, from the exposure, they understood the purpose of those suffixes.
This class was so wonderful! Although the instruction was not in Arabic, a lot of Arabic was used (even though I think that if they used Arabic as the medium of communication, it would benefit the students more). The students always laughed, participated, and seemed to enjoy the class. The teacher also was so knowledgeable on the subject matter. In addition, unlike the book, he does not follow the Egyptian dialect. Thus, exposing the students to more dialects of Arabic that they may encounter in the future.
Source: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/islam/literature/pictures/allah.gif
In class, the teacher begins by talking to the students on general topics for a brief amount of time. Later, they begin watching a movie about a girl named Maha. Maha is an Egyptian female college student. In the clip, she was using photos to introduce her family to us. For this activity, the students were asked to write down the sentences in Arabic. Then, the teacher asked the students to move around and check each other's answers. The students compared their answers as the teacher check the students' homework. What a bright way to manage time!
Afterward, the class as a whole discusses the answers and translated the sentences. The video was played several times to check accuracy. The approach that the teacher adopted in regard to translation was in the form of wh-questions. Instead of saying "what this word means?" he would say "how many uncles does Maha have?" with these questions, the students are not merely translating the sentences, they are thinking critically of what she is saying. Like French, Arabic is gendered, which is quite different from English. Here is where I was astonished to see the students master the difference between feminine words and masculine words. Having studied French, I always hated differentiating between words due to gender because it was hard for me to distinguish which is which. However, in French, articles were so important, and if I did not know the gender of the word, I may give it the wrong article. My favorite articles of all time in the French language were "les" and "l'" because they were not gendered. So, YES, I really admire these students for learning such a difficult language.
That short clip opened a can full of grammatical roles and new concepts for these students--which I find extremely well because now they get the meaning since they know the roots of the words, and they need to get the grammatical concept behind it. The teacher introduced possessive pronouns to them, which are completely different from the English or the French possessive pronouns. However, from their exposure to Arabic in the past couple weeks; they were able to identify many of them. I was surprised! They did not study it before--it only comes up in the examples. Yet, from the exposure, they understood the purpose of those suffixes.
This class was so wonderful! Although the instruction was not in Arabic, a lot of Arabic was used (even though I think that if they used Arabic as the medium of communication, it would benefit the students more). The students always laughed, participated, and seemed to enjoy the class. The teacher also was so knowledgeable on the subject matter. In addition, unlike the book, he does not follow the Egyptian dialect. Thus, exposing the students to more dialects of Arabic that they may encounter in the future.
Source: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/islam/literature/pictures/allah.gif
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