Transitioning Arab students to standard Arabic: Strategies from cognitive psychology

• In Event: Sustainable quality education: mother tongue and "official" languages

Proposal

The presentation refers to an oral standard Arabic curriculum for grade 1 and the rationale for its development, based on specific memory research. (Citations will be in the paper to be submitted.) The background and development process are below.
International tests show that students studying in Arabic fall behind early on in comparison to students studying in other languages. This is evident in the 4th grade PIRLS and TIMSS tests (Martin et al., 2012), and the gap remains in higher grades. All Arab countries are very concerned, and well-to-do parents choose English-medium schools where possible.
The inhabitants of various countries speak Arabic vernaculars, but instruction is always in standard Arabic. Children learn the vernacular grammars by collecting samples from the environment unconsciously, but standard Arabic is an ancient language that is not commonly heard. Its forms must be consciously learned in school. The time needed to learn grammatical features and vocabulary sets students back early on. The situation is exacerbated by teaching the language through reading, which students are still learning. A vicious circle results, whereby average students can neither read nor understand texts for the first 3-4 years. Countries dedicate multiple periods to Arabic instruction, but they also invariably emphasize grammar terminology and definitions that students must recite.
Students must learn grammar early and do it efficiently, so that they can instantly and accurately make sense of their textbooks and academic speech. Thus, grammar basics must be taught in grade 1. How? Cognitive science research offers some research-based solutions.
Arabic is a conjugated language, with complex but very predictable patterns in verbs and nouns. Young children unconsciously learn patterns of changes and input them into implicit memory. To perform like other students in the world, Arab students must instantly and unambiguously know what each prefix and suffix means. Since standard Arabic is not spoken, students cannot sample patterns from the environment. They must learn them explicitly, through systematic declensions and conjugations.
However, these are not used. Many educators have been influenced by English (that has few conjugations) and Standard Arabic through “natural” texts. Also memorization of conjugations seems “traditional” and retrograde. However, learning one ending does not enable students to predict other declensions (“I went yesterday” vs. “the girls will go tomorrow”). In countries like Morocco, where the linguistic distance from the vernaculars is significant, students cannot reliably predict verb endings for years.
To offer solutions, the Al Qasimi foundation of Ras al Khaimah, UAE, sponsored the development of an oral curriculum for grade 1 of Arab-speaking schools. The content includes the grammatical forms typically used in grade 1 reading textbooks. The curriculum consists of about 60 lessons of 15-20 minutes and is intended as an up-front supplement to Ministry curricula. It covers conjugations of verbs, pronouns, nouns, and presentation of other features that differ from the various vernaculars. Prominent are 6 the 10 verb forms and the behavior of certain letters found in the verb roots. For "low level" grammatical features, this may be an efficient way to input rarely heard patterns into students’ implicit memory. The aim is to develop at least a passive, instant fluent comprehension of common grammatical features.
The session will present the grammatical outline and the curriculum specifics, illustrated by videoclips from an initial pilot. (Course is to be piloted and perfected further.) The presentation would obviously interest participants working on Arabic. However, it presents a methodology that will help other countries that face such curricular dilemmas. Structured, transition-oriented courses could be developed for children who speak dialects of official languages. Examples are Cyprus and the German part of Switzerland, where dialects are spoken that are quite distinct from the standard modern Greek and “high” German respectively.

Author

• Helen Abadzi, University of Texas at Arlington