Arabic-L:PEDA:Using Shami materials from Al-Kitaab

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 27 Nov 2013
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1) Subject: Using Shami materials from Al-Kitaab

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1)
Date: 27 Nov 2013
From: David Wilmsen <david.wilmsen at gmail.com>
Subject: Using Shami materials from Al-Kitaab

I must respectfully disagree with Professor Jorgenson as to the nature of
the Shami materials in the third edition of al-kitaab. While agreeing with
him that those are generally of fine quality for what they represent (but
see below), I cannot agree that they may stand alone as a class in
vernacular Arabic. They are clearly designed and intended to follow the
sequence of the lessons in written Arabic of al-kitaab, and as such cannot
meet the requirements of a course in spoken Arabic, in which learning to
meet basic needs in the target language must take priority.

Our students complain, for instance, that after weeks and months of
studying Arabic, they still have not acquired such basic items as colours
and common grocery items, toiletries and health products, basic household
furnishings, and other such quotidian concepts as are likely to come up in
conversation several times in a day or week while they attempt operating in
Arabic.

I maintain that learning things like annexation and adjectival agreement
would be much less conceptually challenging were students to begin learning
constructions like *miftāḥ is-sayyāra* and *sayāra kiḥliyya*  or if
you will *miftāḥ
il-bāb *and* bāb* *ša''iti i**ẓ-ẓġīrə *than they would encountering *maktab
al-qubūl *or *al-umam al-mutaḥida, *the latter being a perennial butt of
complaint and ridicule amongst our students.

This does not mean that one cannot and does not discuss the United Nations
in vernacular Arabic; we do, just listen to Maysoun Abou Asaad pronouncing
it in the dialect of Damascus in lesson one (if you can hear her, that is,
the sound quality being quite compressed in the first several lessons). But
in a good colloquial Arabic class, one should start by learning to procure
and to use sandwiches, shoelaces, tickets, toothpaste, tangerines, water
bottles, and wicker baskets, their colours, sizes, better and worse
qualities, and directions for their utilization or preparation, none of the
vocabulary or idiomatic usages for which al-kitaab supplies, at least not
in the early lessons. As things stand now, instructors must provide all of
these things as they arise in class or as they themselves see the need. We
all do such things, anyway, but we should not be compelled by the textbook
to have to do it. A good book will provide us the framework. This one
doesn't.

A further example in the grammar not the lexis: colloquial lessons should,
as a matter of course, be giving not just the means of saying, for example,
'I want' and 'I don't want', but also 'I want it' and 'I don't want it',
which al-kitaab does not provide - at least not in the Shamy dialect. Yet,
such constructions are to be encountered by students dozens of times in a
single day. My estimate (based in observation) is four to eight times an
hour. It does, however, eventually get round to instructing students to
express such things in acceptably idiomatic Arabic writing.

This, then, brings up another frailty of the latest approach promulgated in
the third edition of al-kitaab. In its commendable effort to introduce
genuine spoken Arabic into the Arabic classroom, it ends by delimiting
students' exposure to and practice with the Arabic of writing, leaving
students to make their own way through a jumble of slightly conflicting
rules of, say, verb conjugations, permitting them to choose for the time
being, the manner in which they wish to conjugate in their early attempts
at composition.

The result, I am afraid, is that what we have in our hands is neither a
textbook in spoken Arabic nor one in the Arabic of modern writing.

 In my two years of teaching out of book i third edition, I have observed a
noticeable decrease in third edition students' preparedness after a year of
study for continuing on to the next stage. Perhaps this will become less
critical now that they will be transitioning to the 3rd edition of book ii
rather than going from book i third edition to book ii second edition. But
that rather seems to defeat the goal of language pedagogy.

I think it time that the profession open a discussion about our means,
methods, and goals in the teaching of this wonderful language.

David Wilmsen
Associate Professor of Arabic
Chair, Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages
American University of Beirut
Bliss Street, Hamra
Beirut, Lebanon
1107 2020
tel:  +961-1-350000 ext. 3850/1

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