Rasha K Soliman

The communicative approach in Second Language (L2) teaching has mostly been linked to the students’ speaking abilities in different communicative situations. Therefore, some teachers may confuse it with the Situational Language Teaching Approach (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). In teaching a multi‐glossic language like Arabic, teachers may retain speaking activities only for dialectal communicative situations such as in role‐plays and class  conversations. In the last two decades, researchers have supported the notion that speaking activities are not
only necessary for learning situational speaking skills, but they also play a cognitive role in L2 acquisition (Hubert,  2011).

In this presentation I argue that providing speaking activities in MSA supports the acquisition of syntactic and morphological MSA rules which are mostly needed for MSA writing and reading tasks. I will present examples of communicative and task‐based speaking activities that provide context to the learning of some of the MSA rules that may be perceived to be complex such as the conjugation of the hollow verbs, the accusative mood of verbs after المصدرية أن and the use of the accusative forms after أخواتها و كان  .These activities do not aim to support the practice of speaking skills, but they instead have a pedagogical role in supporting the cognitive process involved in acquiring MSA rules.

References 
Hubert, M. D. (2011). The Speaking‐Writing Connection: Integrating Dialogue into a Foreign Language Writing Course. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 8(2), 170‐183.
Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd ed. ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This talk was presented in the AUC conference "Approaches and Challenges in Arabic Language Pedagogy" in December 2017.  The paper presents aims, examples, tips and ways forward on how to integrate Arabic cross-dialectal awareness and comprehension into the Teaching of Arabic as a Second Language (TASL) from day 1 of learning.  Such an integration aims to support the learners to clearly understand the variation that exists in Arabic and to achieve maximum cross-dialectal comprehension even when they are instructed in one or two varieties only.  This would be a pioneering approach to TASL which can also be applied to the teaching of other L2 in order to best familiarise their learners of variability and to break the traditional approach of teaching a language as one fixed invariable form.

Examples given in this presentation are slides from planned lectures delivered to Level 1 students at the University of Leeds by Dr Rasha Soliman to demonstrate some of the elements of variation that can be presented to beginners in order to familiarise them with dialectal variation.

This presentation will discuss the importance of applying the CEFR scale to the teaching and learning of the Arabic language in the UK and abroad.  It will present and briefly review the scholarly work that has taken place already in order to implement the CEFR to the teaching of Arabic.  The talk will also present the different language facets that are ought to be considered when applying the CEFR and some of the challenges that face the Arabic language professionals in that respect.  The talk will conclude with suggested actions to take in order to reach a well-planned CEFR levels and language content for Arabic.

In this presentation, I shared the results of a learning needs survey conducted at the University of Manchester in 2008.  More can be found in:
Paul Anderson & Yasir Suleiman (2009) Arabic on Campus and Beyond, British Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies, 36:1, 125-144

The Teaching and Learning of Arabic as a Second Language in Higher Education (HE) mostly entail the learning of Modern Standard Arabic and one dialect which is commonly learnt during a Year-abroad study in an Arabic speaking country (Dickins & Watson, 2006).  The ability of these learners to speak or understand other Arabic dialects is recently being researched (Trentman, 2011).  Teaching more than one dialect can be perceived as an unattainable achievement by both the learners and the HE institutions; however, a more feasible and practical approach is the teaching of the linguistic similarities between the Arabic varieties and training the learners to link between the cognates in these varieties in order to better recognise them.
This talk will present the methodology and the results of an exploratory multi-case study in which four advanced Arabic L2 learners were trained to recognise cognates across six Arabic varieties.  The training consisted of three hours of strategy instruction and an introduction to the morpho-phonological aspects of these Arabic varieties.  The results show that the training had a positive impact on the learners’ ability to recognise cognates in these varieties which consequently can result in better Arabic cross-dialectal L2 comprehension.   

References:
Dickins, J., & Watson, J. C. E. (2006). Arabic Teaching in Britain and Ireland. In K. M. Wahba, Taha, Z. A., & England, L. (Ed.), Handbook for Arabic language teaching professionals in the 21st century. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Trentman, E. (2011). L2 Arabic Dialect Comprehension: Empirical Evidence for the Transfer of Familiar Dialect Knowledge to Unfamiliar Dialects. L2 Journal, 3(1).

"Abstract
The diglossia of the Arabic language has attracted a lot of research since the term “diglossia” first appeared in a paper by Ferguson describing that unique linguistic situation of Arabic as well as few other languages (Ferguson, 1954).  The Arabic diglossia, however, does not refer to two forms only, but with the variability of the Arabic dialects, the situation is more complex than other diglossic languages such as German.  The emergence of the Arabic dialects started since the early years of the Islamic conquests and became a sociolinguistic phenomenon that is lasting until now (Versteegh, 1997).
In the field of Teaching Arabic as a Second language (TASL), Arabic diglossia has been a concern that is not yet fully resolved.  Many universities focus the teaching on the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with insignificant attention to the Arabic dialects.  Even when a dialect is taught, there are not enough efforts to raise the learners’ awareness of the Arabic variability, and therefore, many students stick to learning either MSA only or MSA and one dialect while the possibility of conversing with and comprehending other dialect speakers seem unattainable. 
This talk will present and discuss the results of two studies on the Arabic cross-dialectal comprehension between native speakers of different dialects and by non-native speakers of Arabic who learnt MSA and one dialect.  The first study observed the comprehension strategies used by 21 native speakers of 11 Arabic dialects in order to reach intelligibility; while the second was a case study investigating the possibility of training the Arabic learners to use the same strategies used by the native speakers in order to improve comprehension of different dialects.  The results showed a significant improve in the learners’ ability to comprehend unfamiliar dialects when explicit training is provided to them.  These studies argue that for the Arabic learners to reach a near-native level of proficiency in such a variable language, it is not enough to learn MSA and one dialect but they need as well to learn the strategies that the native speakers apply in cross-dialectal situations.

References
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). DIGLOSSIA. Word-Journal of the International Linguistic ‎Association, 15(2), 325-340.‎
Versteegh, K. (1997). The Arabic language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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In the Teaching of Arabic as a Second Language (TASL), and like most languages, it has been the educated Arabic speaker who was the target to aim for.  In describing the set of language knowledge and skills that the educated Arabic speaker has, three different skills of Arabic language use can be listed: first, they can understand Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and probably speak it to variable levels of proficiency; second, they can speak and understand usually one mother tongue – which is one of the Arabic dialects; and third, they can achieve a different level of communication in cross-dialectal situations.

The field of TASL has focused mainly on the first two of these skills.  The Arabic students at university level usually graduate with a good level of MSA and one dialect of the Arab country they went to in their year abroad.  What have been missing are the cross-dialectal communication skills.  In my PhD research – which is still in progress – I have recorded informal conversations between different native dialects speakers. The data analysis shed the light on some of the skills used by the Arabic speakers in order to reach mutual intelligibility even when they have little knowledge of each others’ dialects.  The results focus on two different skills: the language use (the choice and the type of variety switching) and the language comprehension (the top-down and bottom-up listening strategies) used by the native speakers.

In this presentation, I would like to share and discuss the results of my data with colleagues in the field of TASL and explore the role of cross-dialectal skills in the learning and teaching of Arabic.

This chapter discusses the benefits of implementing the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) scale for Arabic language teaching at the university level, and what the implementation process entails.  The chapter starts with an introduction to the framework and its development, as well as its principles for application to non-European languages.  I will then present the rationale behind adopting the CEFR for Arabic, and review the current attempts for its implementation.  The chapter will conclude with suggestions for a research agenda that would support the creation of an objective and comprehensive CEFR for Arabic, and will present a first-hand attempt of the content of the first three levels in an Arabic CEFR scale.

This research is divided into two interlinked parts. The first part reviews literature on the diglossia and variability of the Arabic language and investigates how mutual intelligibility is achieved in informal conversations between speakers of different Arabic dialects. 11 conversations were recorded between speakers of 12 Arabic dialects. Instances of borrowing from Modern Standard Arabic were observed and analysed. The participants were also interviewed after the recorded conversations in order to get more insight into the listening comprehension strategies that they applied to achieve intelligibility. The results show that the native speakers tend to rely mostly on their native dialect in cross-dialectal interaction with a much smaller number of borrowings from Modern Standard Arabic in comparison with previous studies. A number of listening strategies were observed to be used in order to aid intelligibility. These strategies included making use of the context, ignoring non-content words and making use of their linguistic knowledge and the root and pattern system in Arabic as a frame of reference in comprehending unfamiliar cognates. The analysis also showed that dialect familiarity has a major role in aiding comprehension between the native speakers of different Arabic dialects.
The second part, first, examines the needs of learning Arabic as a second language in Higher Education, then presents a case study that tests the advanced Arabic learners’ level of cognate recognition in unfamiliar dialects and whether explicit strategy teaching and lexical training can improve their dialectal lexical comprehension. Five final year university students of Arabic with an advanced level in MSA and exposure to a dialect participated in this study. Pre and post-tests of dialectal listening comprehension were administered. The results of a higher score in the post-test confirmed that the explicit strategy training helped the Arabic students to achieve better comprehension of cognates in unfamiliar dialects.