SETESOL 2012 Session Notes - "Understanding Arabic"

THURSDAY

2:45-3:30pm

Understanding Arabic: Insights to Improve Your ESL Instruction to Arabic Speakers, Ned Darlington

• spent 10 years living in North Africa and Middle East
• there is a distinction between spoken and written Arabic
• What does it mean to be Arab?
• 19 different nations, 358 million people in the Arab world - 2 continents, 5,000 miles
• constitutional monarchies (Jordan, Morocco), kingoms (KSA, Oman), republics (Lebanon, Tunisia)
• Semitic people
• Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese)
• just because someone speaks Arabic doesn't mean they are Arab
• there are multiple cultural identities (Egyptians, Lebanese, Berbers, Kurds, Somalis)
• religiously diverse (Muslims, Christians, Druze)
• Arabs identify themselves in several different ways, but above all, linguistically
• "The beauty of man lies in the eloquence of his tongue." Arab Proverb
• understanding the structure of Arabic can help with ESL instruction
• contrastive analysis is an effective teaching tool
• Arabic is classified into three categories
• Classical Arabic (written in Koran) "purest" Arabic
• Modern Standard Arabic "the lingua franca" - nobody's mother tongue… it is a simpler written Arabic used across the Arab word in print, media, education
• Colloquial or Dialectal "the mother tongue" - varies from country to country… maybe 30 different types! generally unwritten, but widely used for TV programs
• Three tiered system of language can cause confusion for Arabic speakers when learning reading, writing, listening and speaking skills
• Does having differences in spoken and written Arabic pose unique problems in teaching ESL?
• Would errors be different in speaking and writing?
• Structure Comparison (see image of slide)
• 4 problems caused by structure differences
• 1. poor penmanship
• 2. slower recognition and processing of letters (esp. vowels)
• 3. Difficulty with reading comprehension
• 4. Difficulty with reading strategies (skimming, scanning, etc.)
• Verbs
• There is no "TO BE" 
• There is no auxiliary "TO DO" - ex. question words, final rising intonation
• There is no "TO HAVE" - phrases with prepositions (with/ma, for/li, or in/bi) and the verb "to posses" are used rather than "to have"
• ex. "Abdul has books." --> "with Abdul many books."
• creates challenges for teaching questions and negations
• Articles
• There are no indefinite articles (determiners a and an) in Arabic, but the presence of vowel diacritics ("little squiggly marks") at the end of a noun
• The definite article in Arabic is attached to front of the noun "the house"
• The possessive form is a genitive construction (known as "idafa") in Arabic
• House of the man = house theman
• Relative pronouns
• there is no relative pronoun but a particle with a definite article (translated literally = the shoe, the which, the that)
• Another common error is the repetition of the object
• Arabic present tense - subject and pronoun suffix are attached and written as one word  "taktubuhu" = "shewriteshim"
• "That the man who shewriteshim." = That is the man who she writes.
• Pronunciation Challenges
• Vowels
• Arabic has 6 vowels and 2 diphthongs
• short vowel often omitted and when written are diacritical marks
• boot/boat/bought --> persistent problem
• Consonants
• Voiced consonants /v/ and /g/ do not exist in Arabic but are reproducible by working on the Arabic unvoiced /f/ and /k/
• (can vary by dialect)
• no /th/ unvoiced and /th/ voiced turn into /t/ and /d/
• there is no /p/
• Spelling
• Due to the diacritic representation of vowels in Arabic, the spelling of vowels in English can be confusing
• Spelling/Vocabulary
• English/Arabic dictionaries are very different
• To look up a word in an Arabic dictionary you must know its three and four consonant root
• ex. imagine looking for the word "understand" using the 3 consonant root NDS
• SUBJECT = MOLDUA (?)