Arabic-L:PEDA:MSA Course Recommendations

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

Arabic-L: Mon 05 Jun 2000
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: MSA Course Recommendations

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1)
Date: 05 Jun 2000
From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" <ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Subject: MSA Course Recommendations

    I have recently seen several advertisements on this list for the
Arabic placement test at the edumagic.com site. Personally I'm glad to
be informed about this site. But I'm a bit worried that vistors to this
list who are maybe just starting Arabic are getting guidance from
commercial interests without sufficient input from disinterested
academics and professional educators.

    My own feeling, after having visited this site and taken several of
the placement tests, is that I would not recommend them. For students
whose goal is communicative competence in modern spoken and written
Arabic the tests are completely inappropriate.

    The software is very nice and the tests are fun, but the content
reflects a traditional style of pedagogy which may once have been
appropriate for teaching Quranic Arabic to non-Arab Muslims, but which
is completely at odds with modern communicative methods.

    From the very lowest level onward, the morphology parts of the tests
focus almost exclusively on aspects of Classical Arabic grammar (dual
and feminine plural verb inflections, for example) that are absent from
most spoken forms of Arabic and which are difficult for most Arabs. The
grammar portions only test mastery of Arabic grammatical terminology.
For beginners neither of these areas of knowledge are very useful,  and
I try to avoid them.

    I don't mean to be too harsh on this company, whose intenitions are
no doubt good. But I found it extremely frustating as a student and
more so as a teacher that so many native-Arabic speaking teachers of
Arabic are unwilling or unable to teach the various registers of Arabic
as they actually use them, and seem instead to regard knowledge of
Arabic as knowlege of a body of arcane and abstruse lore of little or
no use to anyone.

Robert R. Ratcliffe
Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan

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End of Arabic-L: 05 Jun 2000