Arabic-L:PEDA:Colloquial First

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 19 Jun 2007
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Colloquial First
2) Subject:Colloquial First

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1)
Date: 19 Jun 2007
From:yaacolangelo at hotmail.com
Subject:Colloquial First

Prof. Dilworth,
Here is a link to a page in Arabic for translators and professors of  
Arabic. It would be interesting if we could continue the discussion  
there.
http://www.atida.org/forums/showthread.php?p=5970&posted=1#post5970
John


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2)
Date: 19 Jun 2007
From:"David Wilmsen" <dww22 at georgetown.edu>
Subject:Colloquial First

I did not quote Qafisheh (who happened to be a professor of mine) but
simply summarized his results.  Any dispute with his results must,
therefore, be with him and not with me, even though his results
support my point.

As for my experience with interpreters, I was for twelve years the
director of Arabic and Translation Studies in what is now called the
School of Professional Studies at the American University in Cairo
(and for two more years responsible for that programme and others as
an associate dean in the School). The programme offered professional
certification in translation and simultaneous and consecutive
interpreting in Arabic, French, and English and for many years
conducted a translation and interpreting service that provided
interpreting for almost any kind of conference as can be held, up to
and including peace talks in Sharm El Sheikh and sessions of the
League of Arab States.  As the director and a teacher in the
programme, I have observed Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, and
interpreters from other parts of the Arab world at work in the booth
and in the classroom (the classroom observations being not limited to
my department at AUC but also at al-Azhar and Cairo University as well
as at Notre Dame University in Lebanon).  Graduates of my programme
(some of whom I trained personally and whose careers I sponsored) are
highly placed interpreters at international organizations like the
IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the International
Aviation Authority, as well as the high profile media outlets like the
BBC, al-Arabiyya, and al-Jazeera.

My observations of interpreters in practice are presented in "One
Global Standard or Multiple Regional Standards?:  A problem in the
practice and  pedagogy of Arabic interpreting," in Collados Aís,
Ángela, Manuela Fernández Sánchez, Macarena Pradas Macías,  Concepción
Sánchez Adam, Elisabeth Stévaux (eds). La evaluación de la calidad en
interpretación: docencia y profesión. Granada: Comares. 2003,  69—78.

They are also summarized in "What is Communicative Arabic?" in Wahba,
Kassem, Zeinab Taha, and Lisbeth England, Handbook for Arabic Language
Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century. Mahwa, NJ:  Erlbaum. 2006,
125—138, where I make the argument for beginning the teaching of
non-native students of Arabic with a dialect.

On the other hand, I have not had a great deal of experience with
court interpreting, or any other type of community interpreting,
except for some involvement with the training of community
interpreters among the African refugee communities residing in Cairo,
which programme was run out of the department of Forced Migration and
Refugee Studies at AUC, and for which I served mostly as an advisor
and an occasional lecturer.

I think this permits me to speak with some authority on the practice
of Arabic interpreting.

Now that that is out of the way, allow me to reiterate that those
objecting to beginning the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language
with an introduction to a vernacular by expressing the fear that
students will thereby never learn to contend with the higher registers
of the Arabic literary heritage or the intricacies of the Arabic
grammatical tradition are missing the point of what is being proposed
here.

What is being proposed is a sequence of Arabic teaching to more or
less normal college students who may or may not go on to higher levels
of Arabic study by first introducing them to the spoken vernacular
before giving them thorough instruction in the writing system. (We
hope that some of them will become so fascinated by it all that they
will go on to become scholars or otherwise specialists in the field.)

We cannot build a language teaching programme using sterling examples
of non-native speakers who have become highly proficient in
specialized aspects of declaimed formal Arabic  – who also seem to
have acquired their command of fusha for specific purposes such as
religion – as its model and ultimate goals. Such an enterprise would
be doomed to failure. These remarkable individuals gain their
impressive skill through sheer determination and personal effort;
results such as they have achieved are well beyond the scope of what a
university programme can offer.  It would be nice if we could, but we
cannot.  I would venture to guess that such people will have acquired
their impressive skill with fusha regardless of the sequence in which
they learned the vernacular (if they have learned it at all) either
before or afterwards.  What is more, to cite them as examples is
perhaps a bit disingenuous, considering that some such learners
probably have no interest in learning a vernacular, preferring to
focus their attention on the more formal registers of the liturgical
language of Islam.

Most of our students do not share such interests.

Objections naming such individuals as exemplars needlessly complicate
the debate.  The question is in fact much simpler:  in what order are
we as Arabic teachers to approach the teaching of a dialect?  In
answering that, we must take the needs, interests, desires and
proclivities of our students in mind, just as we should be considering
the results of the latest thinking in the field of language learning.
And we should be paying some attention to how our students are going
to be using their language skills in their professional lives and what
employers wish from them.  Most are not going to become scholars or
converts to Islam, but many of them will engage with speakers of
Arabic and with the Arabic press and media throughout their careers
(at least we hope that they will, and they share that hope).


I am not claiming that educated speakers of Arabic cannot declaim in
fusha; they can, and the evidence for this is multitude.  Nor am I
arguing that students should not learn fusha. They certainly should;
indeed I advocate in Wahba, Taha, and England for a five-year
undergraduate major in Arabic to provide students the time they need
to delve deeply into Arabic with a full four years dedicated to fusha
(they need more than five years, but university administrations are
not likely to concede them even that). What I and others like me are
arguing is that it is more logical to begin teaching Arabic with a
dialect (it hardly matters which one) before going on to an intensive
study of fusha.  As Parkinson pointed out in this thread, students who
have first learned to perform conversationally in an Arabic vernacular
will have fewer conceptual difficulties contending with the
complexities of fusha, having first learned analogous (if simpler)
concepts in the dialect.

We should of course be aiming to enable them to discourse at the
higher registers of Arabic either spoken or written as a fair number
of reasonably well-educated native speakers of the language can do.
Whether they ever become highly proficient at declaiming
extemporaneously in fusha with complete flawless vowelling is another
matter, and should really be of only small concern to us as teachers.

The vernaculars and fusha are aspects of a single language.  My
contention remains that any true Arabist must be proficient in both
fusha and at least one vernacular; to be deficient in either one is to
miss half of the rich culture of Arabic.

David Wilmsen

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End of Arabic-L:  19 Jun 2007