Arabic-L:PEDA:Positive to Neutral Reactions to Colloquial First

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 07 June 2007
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Positive to Neutral Reactions to Colloquial First
2) Subject:Positive to Neutral Reactions to Colloquial First

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1)
Date: 07 June 2007
From:"Waheed Samy" <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:

Dear Mustafa,

This idea of starting students with colloquial Arabic during the first

semester makes sense.  You point out several concerns that some of us  
share.

Students have complained that they have not been sufficiently warned  
about

the situation they find themselves in when all they know is MSA.  Your

experiment should be a very interesting one.  I would personally be very

interested to learn what you discover as you implement this new plan:  
what

gains, what losses, and what difficulties.

Waheed Samy



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2)
Date: 07 June 2007
From:"Waheed Samy" <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Positive to Neutral Reactions to Colloquial First
At BYU for several years now we have been including colloquial with  
fusha during the first two years of instruction.  We spend the first  
month to two months working on the script and colloquial, so they get  
something of a grounding in basic survival level speaking, and then  
we start the fusha materials and continue with both, about half the  
time on each.  We make something of an effort to keep the two  
straight, partly by emphasizing survival speaking in colloquial and  
more formal topics and reading in fusha, but we don't obsess over  
it.  We have over 150 students a year start out Arabic 101, and far  
less than half of these make it to third year and any hope of real  
fluency.  We have not felt that we have harmed our good students at  
all with this method (several have gone on to become CASA students  
and excellent Arabists), but we also felt a moral duty to do  
something for those students who were only going to be with us for a  
semester or two or three.  What this does for them is gives them the  
ability to do something fun and useful with the small amount of  
Arabic they know, and if they go to the Middle East, it gives them  
survival skills useful for taking taxis, buying things in the market,  
getting and giving directions and the like.  It prepares all of the  
students for the 'real world' where the reality is that the two  
varieties exist not only side by side, but all wrapped up in each  
other, with much modern literature filled to the brim with  
colloquial, and with even newspapers and other news sources having  
far more colloquial than many care to admit.  There is something  
archaic and even otherworldly about a purist insistence on fusha only  
for our students, when no one insists on such a thing for native  
speakers, and when the language they are going to encounter has  
little to do with that purist ideal.

Another thing I would like to point out is that when we do colloquial  
we don't explain much (although we do some), we just do a lot of  
talking about very basic things.  This means that when we reach  
things like the idaafa, or noun adjective phrases, etc. in Fusha, we  
can just say: you know, like we say such and such in colloquial, and  
they are already quite accustomed to it and it doesn't seem strange  
at all to them.  It helps them get from the theoretical to the  
practical in a very short time.

Except for the first couple of weeks, we do colloquial entirely in  
script.  We make no effort whatsoever to 'represent' the language  
with the script in any kind of complete way.  The students end up  
learning that sometimes colloquial words are written more like they  
sound, and sometimes more like they are written in fusha, and that as  
long as they know that it is colloquial and they know the word, it  
shouldn't bother them.  This has turned into a major advantage to the  
students once they become advanced and have to deal with the wide  
variety of methods native speakers use for writing the colloquial.

Dil Parkinson

dil at byu.edu


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End of Arabic-L:  07 June 2007