Arabic-L:PEDA:Arguments for Colloquial First

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 13 Jun 2007
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1) Subject:Arguments for Colloquial First

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1)
Date: 13 Jun 2007
From:"David Wilmsen" <dww22 at georgetown.edu>
Subject:Arguments for Colloquial First

The twin notions that students who wish to learn a vernacular variety
of Arabic are lazy or incapable of learning to read and write Arabic
are preposterous.  Has either proposition ever been tested
objectively? In fact the second has been by Qafisheh, the results of
which he reported to the 6th ACTFL annual meeting, Atlanta, Georgia,
1972 in a paper entitled  "From Gulf Arabic into Modern Standard
Arabic:  A pilot study."  He points out that students who begin their
study of Arabic with exposure to the vernacular are generally more
motivated and successful in their study than are those who begin with
fusha.  (Thirty-five  years ago and we are still debating the issue!)

That students are purely lazy and simply wish to party is a novel
argument (at least to me) in the ongoing debate about how to solve the
problem of dialect in university programmes.  I do not wish to imply
that students are not interested in partying, but to say that they are
lazy is entirely contrary to the facts (at least at  Arizona, Yarmouk,
Michigan, Georgetown, and the American University in Cairo, where I
have experience as either a student of Arabic or a teacher or a
director of an Arabic programme).  Those of my current students at GU
who are taking both fusha and Egyptian Arabic are carrying a combined
credit-hour load of nine hours of Arabic over and above their other
credits. For that reason alone, they cannot be called lazy in the
usual sense of the word.  What is more, those with the interest to
acquire some proficiency in both varieties of the language are
by-and-large a serious bunch, fascinated by all aspects of the
language, within the normal range of interest and capailities, and
itching to learn as much as they can about both.  Most of those who
are not now studying a vernacular, intend to do.  Most are also
enormously frustrated  with the practice of teaching them to contend
with fusha before they are given a systematic treatment of the
vernacular.  It is irresponsible for us as their instructors and
programme administrators to deny them this insofar as it is within our
abilities to do otherwise.  Indeed, I rather think it is we who are
lazy and not our students.  We simply do not wish to expend the effort
to produce engaging teaching materials or to learn to use them (which
might imply learning to speak Arabic the way native speakers of the
language do).

What is more, objections predicated upon the laziness of students, or
their inability to acquire proficiency in nominal declensions once or
if they become proficient in a vernacular, or the fear of betraying
the scholarly tradition of the study of the glorious Arabic literary
heritage ignore the reasons given by Mughazy for implementing a
programme that introduces students to vernacular Arabic first as much
as they ignore the social reality of Arabic in its natural
environment.  How many native speakers of Arabic, even well educated
ones, can decline nouns flawlessly?  And among those who can, how many
do? (In anecdotal support of this, I just watched a guest on an
al-jazeera talk show attempting to speak with nominal declensions with
horribly solecistic results).

I have worked for years with Arabic interpreters and teachers of
translation and interpreting whose very professional success hinges
upon their proficiency in composing and declaiming in fusha.  The fact
of the matter is that despite their very advanced professional
proficiency in that variety, they spend most of their time in the
vernacular, even in their professional pursuits.  They conduct almost
all of their discourse respecting the fields and techniques,
terminology and texts of translation and interpreting; concerning the
advising and teaching of students of translation and interpreting
(along with the teaching itself); and certainly all of the daily
office procedures and operations of an academic department or a
translation office in vernacular Arabic. In more than a decade of
observing Arabic interpreters at work, I only once witnessed an
interpreter performing in the booth while declining all of his nouns,
to the great admiration of his colleagues.  Most of his colleagues
never bothered, or, as is perhaps more likely, are not capable of
doing so in the first place.

Why should we teach our students to speak Arabic in a way native
speakers do not?  Well, if our goal is to produce government spokesmen
whose sole skill is declaiming in fusha over the Arabic airways - the
way the programmes in the former Soviet republics do - or scholars who
can parse ancient texts without ever leaving their wood-panelled
offices, then the exercise is worthwhile.  While those may be our
goals (they are not mine), they certainly are not the goals of most of
our students, serious and lazy.

To teach Arabic as a dead literary language in order to produce
graduates who can decline Arabic nouns flawlessly but who cannot speak
a word of it seems counterproductive in the extreme and it neither
serves the interests of students nor of their potential employers
after graduation.  What is more, it is contrary to current trends in
language teaching, wherein students are taught to engage their
language first by using it as a medium for meeting immediate needs and
providing basic information about themselves, their histories, and
their interests.  It would laughable if it were not so common, to
encourage students do this this in fusha with, as Campbell points out
(in a 1986 essay entitled "The Modern Arabic Course – A Challenge."
that appeared in the International Review of Applied Linguistics in
Language Teaching), all the enthusiasm of "a high school play
rehearsal where confused but courageous youths try to make light
banter of Richard II." is to teach students to do something that no
native speaker of Arabic does.  The alternative, to teach them all
about the higher registers of Arabic, and then to launch them into the
Arab world (those lucky enough to get there), where they are to get by
as best they can, learning a vernacular if they are so disposed to do
so, is rather like teaching them to fly before they learn to walk.

Most of our students, even those who become really good with their
language, are not going into work in the academy, and they are not
going to spend their professional lives investigating ancient
manuscripts, as exciting as that work can be.  What is more, most of
students will probably study no more than two years of language, just
enough to satisfy a graduation requirement (as do most college
students of language).  Any of those who spend all of their time with
fusha will be incapable of contending with classical texts too.  (And
why the assumption that teaching students to contend with classical
texts is an unqualified good for University Arabic programmes?  Surely
there are other worthwhile scholarly pursuits that one might pursue
with his Arabic!).  The interests of both are better served teaching
them real Arabic speech along with reading and writing more or less in
that order.

I think it possible to teach students enough vernacular Arabic in the
space of one or two terms as to enable them then to move into the
study of fusha using the vernacular as a classroom medium, as is the
practice in some parts of the Arabaphone world, and indeed may be the
experience of many many in their first encounter with formal learning
of the Arabic writing system, as they will probably attend quranic
classes in a local mosque presided over by a kindly grandfather who
instructs his charges in the language of the hearth and home.  In case
you think I am engaging in stereotyping, permit me to counter that I
used to see this in practice every day on my way home from work,
walking through the neighborhood of Zeitoun in Cairo.  Or, don't take
my word for it.  Tune in to Dream TV and watch Ahmad Amer expounding
upon tajwiid verse-by-verse in fine, good-humoured Egyptian colloquial
Arabic.

My contention has been borne out to my own satisfaction in the past
year, in which I took the best of my students from no functional
proficiency in Egyptian vernacular to mid intermediate inside of one
or two semesters, the best of them, certainly not lazy, in one
semester.  I believe that all of them would now be capable of
following a fusha class using the vernacular as the medium (and
indeed, I would occasionally conduct discussions of the differences
between fusha and 3aameyya in the vernacular).

To begin Arabic teaching with a vernacular would be to reproduce in
the classroom the native speaker experience. And it would solve the
perennial problem of how to begin teaching first-year fusha using
Arabic as a medium.

To the specious counter argument "which vernacular should we teach?",
my reply is whatever vernacular of which a department has native
speakers, whatever vernacular for which there is a large demand (for
instance Iraqi, just now), or by default Cairene.  As we all know,
Cairene is understood by anyone who has a television.  Our students
may not immediately upon arrival understand the local vernacular, but
the locals will understand them - once they recover from their
surprise at hearing an obvious foreigner speaking Egyptian Arabic. It
does not take much time to begin understanding a new vernacular once
the student has mastered one. This happened to me once in Morocco: at
first utterance my speech was not understood, as my interlocutors
expected me to address them in French, Spanish, or perhaps English;
when I repeated, they could understand easily and in fact they would
laugh because to them I sounded like Adel Imam.  I had a bit more of a
problem understanding them; but after about a week, I had learned most
of the dialect differences in the functional vocabulary of the
Marakesh vernacular and we all got along splendidly.  More recently, I
was travelling in Jordan and the Gulf; when people heard my Egyptian
accent, they assumed that I was indeed Egyptian, even though I don't
look it.  When I said I was, they believed it (once in Jordan, someone
thought I was Circassian).  Noone got annoyed at hearing someone who
obviously was not from the locale speaking another variety of the
language.

Where do we find the teachers?  That is what everyone is asking these
days.  We could find dozens upon dozens of hugely talented teachers if
we got over our institutional bias toward PhDs.  I personally know a
score or more of brilliant teachers possessing Master's degrees in
teaching Arabic as a foreign language and long years of experience who
would come west under almost any condition.  But they are competing
with ABDs and PhD holders.

--  
David Wilmsen, PhD, Arabic language and linguistics
Visiting Associate Professor of Arabic
Dept of Arabic and Islamic Studies
Georgetown University

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End of Arabic-L:  13 Jun 2007