Arabic-L:PEDA:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 23 Jan 2009
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1) Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA
2) Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

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1)
Date: 23 Jan 2009
From:Doria El Kerdany <doriayk at aucegypt.edu>
Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

Wahid,
that was very interesting answer, shokran.
do you have in mind a name of a source where we can find a list of non- 
فصحى features (Egyptian dialect)?
best,
doria El kerdany


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2)
Date: 23 Jan 2009
From:Dina El Zarka <dina.elzarka at uni-graz.at>
Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA


Dear all,

we've been discussing this issue for a while now and it seems that it  
will be long before any agreement can be  reached. Maybe solutions  
will have to be tailored to particular needs, anyway. As far as  
teaching at my department is concerned, we have to get students to a  
quite high level of proficiency in MSA very soon because we are  
training translators. So we cannot afford to spend one whole semester  
on teaching a colloquial language which we then could use as a  
metalanguage for teaching. Also not all of our teachers would be able  
to do that.

In the past I started with MSA and also spoke only MSA in class. In  
the third year we began teaching Egyptian Arabic using Manfred  
Woidichs's materials. While students did very well in class and  
enjoyed it, they never seemed to use it outside class or afterwards. I  
thus turned to some kind of "formal spoken Arabic" along the  
guidelines of Ryding and Zaiback's book with the same title to make  
them actually use the language, teaching the "rules of change" and the  
typical colloquial features first. But as an input I used different  
purely colloquial materials including Egyptian and Shami variants.  
Students performed better in expressing themselves than in the years  
before when they were encouraged to use one dialect, i.e. Egyptian  
Arabic. I guess the reason is that they felt they could also use fusha  
whenever they did not know the right term or construction in ammiyya.

But the main problem is not solved with this method. It is evident  
that exposure to spoken language has to be from the very beginning. So  
I am experimenting at the moment with some kind of formal spoken  
Arabic as a metalanguage which I use from the first semester on  
together with German. At home I speak some funny mixture of Egyptian  
and Iraqi Arabic and we for example avoid ayiz, ayza AND yiriid when  
we wish to express "want" and have tacitly agreed on biddi. There are  
many more examples, and I found that many of the spontaneous  
adaptations (like from my side leaving out the -sh of the negation)  
can be found in Ryding and Zaiback's book. I also went back to  
consistently doing the ammiyya parts of Al-Kitaab which we use for  
teaching.

The drawbacks are evident, students might be confused and will not use  
a coherent local dialect as long as they don't go to an Arab country  
and learn it. I have no idea where this will get us. This strategy  
stems from desperation rather than being based on theoretical or  
empirical grounds.


Dina El Zarka

Graz, Austria



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