Al-Haraka Critiques the US Arabic Teaching System

Editor’s Note: A week ago an article  appeared in the Washington Post criticizing the Arabic teaching system.  For the most part, the article was an unfair partisan attack by a writer with an agenda.  But this does not mean all is well.  The system needs to be critiqued in a fair and objective way. So Al-Haraka, one of the few American who blogs in Arabic, will be writing a series of critiques at Media Shack. 

«من يعلمني حرفاً، صرتُ له عبداً»
“[He] who teaches me a letter, for him I become a slave.” 

-I still remember that day in the American University of Cairo.  I was walking out of an Egyptian dialect class next to my professor.  It had only been a week or so, and I had only been studying the Egyptian dialect for slightly longer than that.  “What do you think?” he asked me hesitantly.  I paused for a minute.  I did not know how exactly to respond.  I did not want to be rude, but rather, I wanted to be informative.  “How can I make these students learn Arabic?

 I have never forgotten his polite interrogation. I have been studying the language since high school. Many people are shocked by this. I began studying it for, what I believe, were all the wrong reasons. Now, I study them because I want to integrate into Arab culture. So many times have I heard the critique from the other side of the fence. Arabic language learning, for some, continues to be a propagandized effort. I have many criticisms, but oxymoronic ”pro-Arab” bias is not one of them. The bias ought to be taught and learned before one criticizes it. I feel many authors, not just those linked above, have failed to recognize this. They have burdened themselves with their own views, and failed to learn something new. With that being said, I have fallen short many times too, even after recognizing this distinction. I look back at my professor’s sincere question, and its depth frightens me. There is so much to be said, and I do not know where to begin.

I want to give a quick disclaimer before I begin a “I know more than all of you combined” rant. I have studied the language privately, by myself, in summer school, and in college courses, since at least 2003. Below are some of those suggestions, based on my general impressions (not that there are not exceptions). Take them or leave them as you wish. I feel that these need to be considered, or Arabic language learning in the US will continue to succeed only in angering Arabs with our hideous Arabic.

1. Get rid of Al-Kitaab. I know, all those who have studied Arabic before, and those who have taught before, praise the merits of this book. Unfortunately, I find it falls short so many times, I will not even consider it a useful source (I even once insulted it in front of an author’s daughter, who is pursuing the Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language Masters at AUC). I will not take time to address the “bias” in these classes (since all seem to forget that it is extremely important to learn, whether you agree or disagree with it), but the content of the book itself. Frankly, it is too political. The book mirrors (if not embodies) the school that publishes it. I do not need to know words like the United Nations two or three chapters into the first book. We also sound like moronic policy wonks because that is the vocabulary base we are given. I know far more classmates who can “sectarianism” than “kick the ball.” Does that really make sense? I do not know any other language taught like this in the US. Also, the extreme nature of enforcing vocabulary words at the expense of teaching synonyms (and most importantly antonyms, how many of you know Al-Kitaab graduates learned the word for bad or ugly instead of good and beautiful from that book?) is praiseworthy if you consider its emphasis on reinforcement and interaction. In reality, however, this is an embarrassment since most students can only recycle about one hundred core words as a result. Furthermore, grammar instruction in that book is disgustingly bad (more on that later). The book makes arbitrary rules which are not true, to the point where more learned teachers laugh at you when you preface a sentence with “But Al-Kitaab says . . .” These are only a few points I can make. The list goes on. So when my Modern Standard Arabic professor, I immediately liked him. So now you ask, what should you teach with? Well, that brings me to my second point.
2. Use native media, not watered-down trash. I know, I know. This is where professors will get smug with me. How do you teach students with native material at the basic level? I will concede, that is almost impossible. Still, refer to my first point. If you must in the beginning, use a real book, like Al-Kitaab Al-Asaasi, which vowels everything and contains no English whatsoever. You might not realize how important this is until you have courses with good professors, who examine your abilities by giving you twenty sentences and making you vowel every single short vowel in the word. That class went from bad to worse, because no one bothers to teach you the finer points on such things (more on that later). That being said, students with a basic understanding of grammar and a decent vocabulary should only be reading authentic material, like newspaper articles. I do not just mean the fifty word garbage pieces on current events. Sports, literature reviews, op-eds, anything that widens your horizons (and vocabulary) ought to be read. After that, you should move on to short stories, then on to novels. At my university, you were only required as a major to reach short story level. This also involves have someone translating classical poetry to you, because your vocabulary base is so limited (I tried to force our professor to teach us the necessary terms for poetic-literary criticism, and he refused on accounts of its complexity). I optionally took a course where we read novels. I was an undergraduate, one of only a few in the graduate course. Over Christmas vacation, we had to read Naguib Mahfouz’ s masterpiece, Children of Our Alley. By the end of the break, I was the only student to finish it. Granted, I did not understand all of it (at times, I understood nothing at all), but I still made the effort. If you could not finish a novel in a week’s time for a French literature course as a French major, you would be a failing student. This brings me to another point.
3. Stop coddling whiny students. I will not expend a lot of energy on this topic. I had only one difficult Arabic teacher in all of college, meaning the entire class thought they were going to fail (the vowel guy). I too thought I was doomed. He gave me a good grade in the end anyway. Teachers, stop babying and rewarding students for the slightest effort. If you were teaching Econometrics or Platonic Philosophy, you do not grind to halt because some students do not understand and teach half of the material required by the syllabus. Introductory classes are meant to be insanely difficult in certain fields to weed out those who clearly do not belong. The opposite happens in Arabic courses (judging by classmates I have had over the years). Professors eventually talk so slow and introduce new material in a way that sickens me. Professors, teach at full speed. By the third or fourth year, students should not struggle to read a five page pamphlet or listen to you speak at full speed. If so, they need to fail or realize Arabic is not their field. Now, onto proper materials and methodology.
4. It’s 2008, and it’s time to go digital. This might be obvious, but it still needs to be said. I once shocked and awed an entire group of Arabic professors in a seminar on methodology and teaching resources. The presenter (I believe it was Mahmoud Abdalla, head of Middlebury’s Arabic School) continually emphasized “digitalizing” the classroom. I laughed when looking around the room. The majority of the Arabic instructors at my institution, like everywhere else in the US academic scene I imagine, are Arab nationals, usually well beyond their forties. That words means little to them. These people have only begun to use computers, and many fail to reply to email. They all need a wake call up, and I do not care who it comes from. I raised my hand politely and went nuts with suggestions I had. This is no longer the orientalist generation where we have to read codified texts and postulate about a people we have not met face to face. The internet is here, and it is here to stay. I remember a professor in my freshmen year had us write an article on Wikipedia. That was by far the best assignment I had in my entire time learning Arabic. Students should be come addicted to using Arabic on the net, and the professors should be their pushers. Kids should read forums (”Al-Qaeda” is not the only group who uses them), write on blogs, listen to Arabic podcasts, contribute to Wikipedia, find pen-pals to email, watch Youtube (Al-Jazeera has their own channel, after all), and anything you can do. You can even help translate open source software, or join a Linux User Group (like this one in Egypt, home to the famous blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah). If you have to learn a language, you will have to learn it inside a community. Use the internet to find that opportunity. Teachers need to be encouraged as well, and someone needs to teach them how to do these things (unfortunately, language learning technologist is not in demand currently). I would also like to see teachers digitalize their own content. Generally, there are no good utilities (except for advanced linguistics systems) on the net or as software to help learn Arabic. I know of no good dictionaries except Sakhr, and it is either offline half of the time, or the entry is way off. American university professors should be pioneering efforts to digitalize all material, from the aforementioned dictionaries to grammatical instruction. This, in turn, leads to another point.
5. Grammar is important, and those who teach otherwise are idiots. I cannot emphasize this point enough. So many students have no clue how to string a sentence together, and know even less about proper style (largely because they do not read often enough, and when they do, the material is not authentic in regards to variation). After more than five years, I still am not sure if I am correct (stylistically or grammatically) when writing a sentence. In speaking, the little confidence I have comes from exposure. No one teaches the grammar at an advanced level, whether in speaking or writing. Why, you ask? Because books like Al-Kitaab discourage anything but piecemeal learning, at best. There are no good sources, except people have mentioned to me from time to time. What’s worse is we are never taught the correct grammatical terms in Arabic. Most teachers will allow you to ask grammar questions in English, even at the advanced levels. Who will take you seriously if you have to discuss grammar in front of those who do not speak English? Let’s be serious here, grammar is too important in the advanced stage to be taught via the current methods. There needs to be a whole new series of books for advanced Arabic learning, where grammar is taught in depth, emphasizing different modes of writing and speaking style. Most kids in the advanced stage, including me, forget the correct word order for a given emphasis. They might learn this at a basic level, but the rest is left to chance. Students do not read enough as it is for that. They should know correct vowelling, which verb forms to use, and correct agreement (especially with numbers, I still get this wrong at times in complex cases). I can tell far too often that this is not happening, since the kids in class would read over words without the correct pronunciation, indicating that they had no idea what verb form they were looking at without full vowel marking (which I hardly ever see, but you need to know well in the first place). Students end up sounding awful, lacking correct comprehension and making no sense to those around them. This comes to bear when they finally (if ever) make it to the Middle East. They think they can write or speak, but no one understands except professors who have spent their lives exposed to really bad Arabists. This leads to my final point.
6. Study-abroad programs need to be reconsidered. Since I have been very, very long-winded, I will keep this as brief as possible. If you cannot tell from my examples, I spent a year at the wonderful American resort of AUC in Egypt. I quickly noticed my proficiency in Arabic was direclty inverse to how much time I spent inside that dump. Sadly, it is one of the very few institutions American universities trust to send their students to for learning the finer points of Arabic. Nonetheless, it is American after all. No one their speaks Arabic, except those studying it when they are in class. We all were so bad no one wanted to bother. I had to live outside the dorms with Egyptians before I remedied the problem. From what I have heard, other programs like Al-Akhawayn in Morocco is exactly the same problem, but with French. I heard Syria is better, but few schools lets you go there. Professors, please start sending students to places where they will learn (e.g. state schools and other places where Arabic is the main medium of instruction). So many kids end up going for “the Middle East experience,” which ends up being speaking English at the Costa down the street. Then, they ride chartered buses back to the dorms to avoid the hassle of cabbies, or interacting with Arabs in general).  I will wrote be writing another post on how AUC moving out of Cairo proper will make many problems worse, since so many “budding” Arabists end up there.

So, those are the very long points I wanted to convey. I wish I told the teacher some of these things, but he knew some of them already. Unfortunately, students are just as much to blame as the system. I have tried very hard, and only reached so far. Many students did not bother to put in the effort, and simply want to put Arabic on their resume (refer to point three). As long as people fail to appreciate the language, they will struggle. But some ambitious people love it, but need a push in the write direction. I hope people who read this and teach Arabic will take some of my points to heart, and help craft a newer generation of Arabists who really know what they are doing