- University of Leeds, Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, Graduate Studentadd
- Arabic Language and Linguistics, Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Arabic translation, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Colloquial Arabic, Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, and 14 moreCommunicative Language Teaching, Egyptian Arabic, Pragmatics, Syntax, Egypt, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Internet Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Dialectology, Translation Studies, Teaching of Foreign Languages, Language Acquisition, Language Teaching, and Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogyedit
- Arabic sociolinguistics, TAFLedit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Translation Studies, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary, and 11 moreTeaching of Foreign Languages, Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy, Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vocabulary Acquisition, Language Teaching, Language Learning, Corpora, Frequency, and Data Format
The role of the internet in the popular protests of 2011 cannot be overestimated. Most importantly, the internet allowed online activists to escape censorship and communicate to thousands if not millions of people in real time. What is... more
The role of the internet in the popular protests of 2011 cannot be overestimated. Most importantly, the internet allowed online activists to escape censorship and communicate to thousands if not millions of people in real time. What is interesting about this form of communication is the language of choice particularly in Egypt – for centuries Classical (CA) or Modern Standard (MSA) Arabic have been the accepted forms of writing; however, the form of language being used online leans more towards colloquial Arabic, which has up until now only been accepted as a spoken form. The relationship between the written and spoken forms of Arabic in Egypt has been detailed by Haeri (2003), but the use of spoken Arabic in online writing is yet to be explored. This paper looks at the relationship between the form of the language used in online writing and the messages being conveyed. The suggestion is that away from the censorship of state media and the press, writers are free to use dialectal fo...
Research Interests:
The Arabic language is a complex, diglossic language, with varying written (fuṣḥa) and spoken (‘āmmīyah) forms. While the study of mixing between fuṣḥa and ‘āmmīyah in spoken Arabic has received some scholarly attention, far less... more
The Arabic language is a complex, diglossic language, with varying written (fuṣḥa) and spoken (‘āmmīyah) forms. While the study of mixing between fuṣḥa and ‘āmmīyah in spoken Arabic has received some scholarly attention, far less attention has been paid to mixing in writing, which this study seeks to address. Badawi’s (1973) landmark study of Egyptian Arabic use identified five language levels, assuming naturally that written Arabic exists as either Classical or Modern Standard Arabic, while mixing between written and spoken forms is reserved as a feature of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA), despite the proliferation of mixed literary works by renowned writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris and Yusuf Sibai at the time. Since Badawi’s (1973) study, studies of mixed Arabic have centred around ESA (Eid, 1988; Bassiouney, 2006), uncovering to some extent the type and degree of, and motivations for, mixing, which have been used as a backdrop for the examination of mixed writing in this...
Since the description of Arabic as a diglossic language by Ferguson (1959a), much attention has been paid to refining this description of the Arabic language situation, and outlining the features of its distinct Standard and dialectal... more
Since the description of Arabic as a diglossic language by Ferguson (1959a), much attention has been paid to refining this description of the Arabic language situation, and outlining the features of its distinct Standard and dialectal forms. Underlying this view, however, is that Arabic is a single, unified language with a large number of shared items between its Standard and dialectal forms. What has been missing from the equation is a comprehensive study of the exact differences between the Standard and dialectal forms, and the level of variation that exists between them. It is the purpose of this study, therefore, to begin to outline these differences, by comparing the features of Standard and Egyptian (Cairene) Arabic. The study identifies three levels of difference between the two forms: phonological, lexical and grammatical, illustrating each with a number of examples. The study is a starting point for comparing between Standard Arabic and other dialects, as well as between the dialects themselves. A note on transliteration scheme This paper employs the Library of Congress romanisation scheme. For the full transliteration scheme, please see Appendix 1.
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Editorial This special issue of the Language Scholar is dedicated to Arabic language learning and teaching in Higher Education. The idea of this issue stemmed out of a growing interest in researching Arabic language pedagogy and an... more
Editorial
This special issue of the Language Scholar is dedicated to Arabic language learning and teaching in Higher Education. The idea of this issue stemmed out of a growing interest in researching Arabic language pedagogy and an increasing number of scholarship projects that investigate Arabic learning and teaching from different perspectives. Such work was witnessed in two international conferences that took place in March 2017 at the University of Leeds, then in April 2019 in Kings College, University of London. The conferences aimed to bring together researchers, scholars and teachers who share the interests and expertise in Arabic language pedagogy and who indeed presented an impressive range of contemporary topics that are being researched in order to advance the field of Teaching Arabic as a Second Language (TASL). In 2019 conference, the call for papers for this issue was announced and it has been a delight for us to receive a number of very interesting topics from colleagues in the UK and abroad who all strive to tackle issues faced by Arabic teachers and learners and suggest ways to overcome challenges, to develop and to promote the learning of Arabic in Higher Education.
This issue has six papers starting with Al-Hamad and Mohamed’s paper which builds on current research on error analysis with a focus on Arabic phonology and orthography. The paper presents interesting examples of phonological and orthographical errors made by 60 participants who are all English speakers studying Arabic in the UK and it showed an inclination to revert to the closest sounds to those in English language. The paper gives good insights to Arabic teachers when planning their teaching activities to support their students getting used to new phonological and orthographical systems. The second paper by Al Tubuly looks at the extent and range of cultural knowledge found in four common Arabic textbooks and shows that although these books dedicate some sections to present Arabic culture, they lack the focus on the deep culture that is needed for proper understanding of the Arabic speaking communities, their beliefs and lifestyles. The paper helps teachers to consider the missing elements of culture that they may need to supplement into their curriculums.
The third paper by Durkawi and Mouazen is a timely topic that looks at the application of the Integrated Approach (IA) in teaching and gives a practical guide to Arabic teachers who plan to use the IA in their programmes. The authors in this paper share examples of good practice and the challenges that they faced in applying the IA at different proficiency levels as well as a number of positive outcomes that they observed. Our fourth paper by El Essawi also provides analysis of Arabic textbooks on how much they focus on communication strategies. This is a topic that received very little attention in the field of TASL as communication strategies are limitedly found and even non-existent in some textbooks as revealed in this paper. El Essawi’s paper concludes with pedagogical suggestions on how to incorporate communication strategies in classroom activities and teaching materials for the objectives of orientation, exposure and practice.
The fifth paper here by Golfetto shifts the readers’ attention to the students as it investigates the learning experience of Arabic heritage learners. The study, which focused on heritage learners in Italian universities, presents an argument that supports the merging of heritage and non-heritage learning classes. It lists the benefits of merging them including the creation of a more homogenous and authentic learning environment that supports linguistic variation in the class and bridges learning gaps. Finally, the issue concludes with the sixth paper by Khalil providing a comparative linguistic description of Modern Standard Arabic and the Cairene dialect at phonological, lexical and grammatical levels with many examples from the two Arabic varieties. The paper is a useful reference to learners and teachers who incorporate linguistic variation in their programmes. It also provides a framework that can easily be followed by other researchers and scholars who wish to analyse other Arabic varieties.
We are grateful to all our authors who shared here their scholarship and research work and made it available to a wide range of readers. We are also deeply thankful to our reviewers, in alphabetical order, Yolanda Cerda, James Dickins, Hanem El-Farahaty, Giorgia Ferrari, Kassem Wahba and Shahira Yacout, who dedicated their time, efforts and knowledge to review these papers and provide invaluable advice. Huge thanks go to the Language Scholar managers Irene Addison-Child and Milada Walkova who put a lot of efforts on checking papers, communication with authors and reviewers and putting all of this work together. We hope that this special issue will provide a good reference for many Arabic teachers and researchers who strive to advance the field of Arabic language pedagogy.
Rasha Soliman (on behalf of the Language Scholar editorial team)
This special issue of the Language Scholar is dedicated to Arabic language learning and teaching in Higher Education. The idea of this issue stemmed out of a growing interest in researching Arabic language pedagogy and an increasing number of scholarship projects that investigate Arabic learning and teaching from different perspectives. Such work was witnessed in two international conferences that took place in March 2017 at the University of Leeds, then in April 2019 in Kings College, University of London. The conferences aimed to bring together researchers, scholars and teachers who share the interests and expertise in Arabic language pedagogy and who indeed presented an impressive range of contemporary topics that are being researched in order to advance the field of Teaching Arabic as a Second Language (TASL). In 2019 conference, the call for papers for this issue was announced and it has been a delight for us to receive a number of very interesting topics from colleagues in the UK and abroad who all strive to tackle issues faced by Arabic teachers and learners and suggest ways to overcome challenges, to develop and to promote the learning of Arabic in Higher Education.
This issue has six papers starting with Al-Hamad and Mohamed’s paper which builds on current research on error analysis with a focus on Arabic phonology and orthography. The paper presents interesting examples of phonological and orthographical errors made by 60 participants who are all English speakers studying Arabic in the UK and it showed an inclination to revert to the closest sounds to those in English language. The paper gives good insights to Arabic teachers when planning their teaching activities to support their students getting used to new phonological and orthographical systems. The second paper by Al Tubuly looks at the extent and range of cultural knowledge found in four common Arabic textbooks and shows that although these books dedicate some sections to present Arabic culture, they lack the focus on the deep culture that is needed for proper understanding of the Arabic speaking communities, their beliefs and lifestyles. The paper helps teachers to consider the missing elements of culture that they may need to supplement into their curriculums.
The third paper by Durkawi and Mouazen is a timely topic that looks at the application of the Integrated Approach (IA) in teaching and gives a practical guide to Arabic teachers who plan to use the IA in their programmes. The authors in this paper share examples of good practice and the challenges that they faced in applying the IA at different proficiency levels as well as a number of positive outcomes that they observed. Our fourth paper by El Essawi also provides analysis of Arabic textbooks on how much they focus on communication strategies. This is a topic that received very little attention in the field of TASL as communication strategies are limitedly found and even non-existent in some textbooks as revealed in this paper. El Essawi’s paper concludes with pedagogical suggestions on how to incorporate communication strategies in classroom activities and teaching materials for the objectives of orientation, exposure and practice.
The fifth paper here by Golfetto shifts the readers’ attention to the students as it investigates the learning experience of Arabic heritage learners. The study, which focused on heritage learners in Italian universities, presents an argument that supports the merging of heritage and non-heritage learning classes. It lists the benefits of merging them including the creation of a more homogenous and authentic learning environment that supports linguistic variation in the class and bridges learning gaps. Finally, the issue concludes with the sixth paper by Khalil providing a comparative linguistic description of Modern Standard Arabic and the Cairene dialect at phonological, lexical and grammatical levels with many examples from the two Arabic varieties. The paper is a useful reference to learners and teachers who incorporate linguistic variation in their programmes. It also provides a framework that can easily be followed by other researchers and scholars who wish to analyse other Arabic varieties.
We are grateful to all our authors who shared here their scholarship and research work and made it available to a wide range of readers. We are also deeply thankful to our reviewers, in alphabetical order, Yolanda Cerda, James Dickins, Hanem El-Farahaty, Giorgia Ferrari, Kassem Wahba and Shahira Yacout, who dedicated their time, efforts and knowledge to review these papers and provide invaluable advice. Huge thanks go to the Language Scholar managers Irene Addison-Child and Milada Walkova who put a lot of efforts on checking papers, communication with authors and reviewers and putting all of this work together. We hope that this special issue will provide a good reference for many Arabic teachers and researchers who strive to advance the field of Arabic language pedagogy.
Rasha Soliman (on behalf of the Language Scholar editorial team)
Research Interests:
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many... more
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Translation Studies, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary, Teaching of Foreign Languages, and 10 moreTeaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy, Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vocabulary Acquisition, Language Teaching, Language Learning, Corpora, Frequency, and Data Format
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many... more
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Translation Studies, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary, Teaching of Foreign Languages, and 10 moreTeaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy, Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vocabulary Acquisition, Language Teaching, Language Learning, Corpora, Frequency, and Data Format
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many... more
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Translation Studies, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary, Teaching of Foreign Languages, and 10 moreTeaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy, Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vocabulary Acquisition, Language Teaching, Language Learning, Corpora, Frequency, and Data Format
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many... more
We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodo- logical aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.
Research Interests:
The role of the internet in the popular protests of 2011 cannot be overestimated. Most importantly, the internet allowed online activists to escape censorship and communicate to thousands if not millions of people in real time. What is... more
The role of the internet in the popular protests of 2011 cannot be overestimated. Most importantly, the internet allowed online activists to escape censorship and communicate to thousands if not millions of people in real time. What is interesting about this form of communication is the language of choice particularly in Egypt – for centuries Classical (CA) or Modern Standard (MSA) Arabic have been the accepted forms of writing; however, the form of language being used online leans more towards colloquial Arabic, which has up until now only been accepted as a spoken form.
The relationship between the written and spoken forms of Arabic in Egypt has been detailed by Haeri (2003), but the use of spoken Arabic in online writing is yet to be explored. This paper looks at the relationship between the form of the language used in online writing and the messages being conveyed. The suggestion is that away from the censorship of state media and the press, writers are free to use dialectal forms of the language for a freer, more direct approach to their readers, which has been more effective in communicating their message than the use of CA or MSA would have been.
The relationship between the written and spoken forms of Arabic in Egypt has been detailed by Haeri (2003), but the use of spoken Arabic in online writing is yet to be explored. This paper looks at the relationship between the form of the language used in online writing and the messages being conveyed. The suggestion is that away from the censorship of state media and the press, writers are free to use dialectal forms of the language for a freer, more direct approach to their readers, which has been more effective in communicating their message than the use of CA or MSA would have been.
Research Interests:
The field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language is dominated by the teaching of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), essentially a written language, while the teaching of the spoken varieties of Arabic plays a secondary role. In this paper, I... more
The field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language is dominated by the teaching of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), essentially a written language, while the teaching of the spoken varieties of Arabic plays a secondary role. In this paper, I challenge this
status quo and aim to show that the spoken varieties of Arabic are necessary for learners to reach communicative competence in Arabic. I will also explore Egyptian Arabic as the most widely recognised dialect of Arabic, and on this basis its suitability
for learners of Arabic as a foreign language. Additionally, I shall be exploring recent developments in the Arabic language with the rise of the internet as a new medium for written Arabic hitherto unexplored in terms of language use. Preliminary indications
show that rather than using formal MSA for writing, internet users are writing in everyday spoken Arabic – a groundbreaking development in terms of Arabic language use, since the spoken language has been regarded as unsuitable for writing up until
now. Finally, using first hand research data collected from current learners of Arabic, I will explore the learner‟s perspective of the Arabic language, and their experience of learning Arabic in the 21st century, with the aim of showing that outdated theory and
practice regarding teaching MSA should be replaced with an up-to-date, learnercentred, communicative approach.
status quo and aim to show that the spoken varieties of Arabic are necessary for learners to reach communicative competence in Arabic. I will also explore Egyptian Arabic as the most widely recognised dialect of Arabic, and on this basis its suitability
for learners of Arabic as a foreign language. Additionally, I shall be exploring recent developments in the Arabic language with the rise of the internet as a new medium for written Arabic hitherto unexplored in terms of language use. Preliminary indications
show that rather than using formal MSA for writing, internet users are writing in everyday spoken Arabic – a groundbreaking development in terms of Arabic language use, since the spoken language has been regarded as unsuitable for writing up until
now. Finally, using first hand research data collected from current learners of Arabic, I will explore the learner‟s perspective of the Arabic language, and their experience of learning Arabic in the 21st century, with the aim of showing that outdated theory and
practice regarding teaching MSA should be replaced with an up-to-date, learnercentred, communicative approach.
Research Interests:
Abstract We present the Kelly project, and its work on developing word lists, monolingual and bilingual, for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method in some detail... more
Abstract We present the Kelly project, and its work on developing word lists, monolingual and bilingual, for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method in some detail and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database and made it accessible for anyone to explore: we present our own first explorations of it.
Research Interests:
Non-Standard and Minority Varieties as Community Languages in the UK: Towards a New Strategy for Language Maintenance
"Integrating Spoken Arabic Dialects in the Community Classroom"
"Integrating Spoken Arabic Dialects in the Community Classroom"