Building the Future of Spoken Arabic Pedagogy, Word by Word

Anyone who has studied Arabic as a foreign language knows the feeling: you’re told it’s an incredibly difficult language; you spend months trying to wrap your head around dual forms, case endings, and a dozen distinct verbal conjugations; and — just when you think it’s starting to click — you meet a native speaker, stutter through introducing yourself, and discover that most of what you’ve learned is completely useless.

What you’ve been learning this whole time, you come to realize, is Standard Arabic, while the actual native “language” of the Arab World is Spoken Arabic, a variant significantly simpler in terms of grammar and even vocabulary.

Standard Arabic

While Standard Arabic does have important applications, it’s the wrong starting point for those actually looking to acquire Arabic. It’s like trying to learn English by reading Shakespeare and learning to conjugate for “thou”. Since the general basis of the two is the same, the more natural progression is to start with Spoken Arabic, get a feel for the language over time by practicing with native speakers, and only then start to learn grammar specific to Standard Arabic. You’ll already know how Iḍāfah works; you’ll just have to add the case endings.

So why the emphasis on Standard Arabic in Arabic pedagogy?Arabic PedagogyRefers to the methods and practices used in teaching the Arabic language. For example: genre-based, task-based, communicative language teaching and a focus on contextualised and structured teaching. On one hand, it’s branded as being more practical, since it doesn’t vary across the region. (Ironically, most native speakers would have difficulty carrying a conversation in Standard Arabic, even if they wanted to.) Moreover, Arabic in the West is mostly offered at the university level, where it’s taken by students interested in — or funneled into, one might say — international relations, journalism, and the like. Standard Arabic is undeniably essential in those fields, but this is still a front-loaded, inefficient learning progression that sets weak foundations & alienates learners from natives.

Spoken Arabic Resources

Since linguistic research into Spoken Arabic is still in its infancy, many of these resources are written by pedagogues in isolation from a scientific knowledge base that could give them greater clarity and precision; the result is an inconsistent level of quality and a frustrating learning experience that often leaves more questions asked than answered.

I discovered this when I started learning Spoken Arabic myself, after a couple of semesters at university. I had to piece information together from a variety of sources and, more often than not, figure things out on my own. I had to describe — if only to myself — Spoken Arabic features that are not well documented or explained anywhere at all, such as the rules surrounding bipartite negationbipartite negation(i.e. negation in two parts) - verbal negation in Spoken Arabic done using two elements: one before the verb (ما) & one after (ش). While it's possible to use both or only one of these elements, there are certain rules surrounding this. & the phonology of the epenthetic vowelepenthetic vowela helping vowel inserted into or between words where one does not normally exist. In Spoken Arabic it appears primarily to make consonant clusters easier to pronounce, but can result in seemingly inconsistent pronunciations to learners.. I started creating instructional videos for others interested in Spoken Arabic as well, to a very positive response. On one hand, I came to understand that linguistic documentation plays a crucial role in the development of pedagogical resources, but the limitations of the format led me to grapple with the inherent limitations of most common language-learning resources — not only for Spoken Arabic but for all languages.

Language Acquisition

Language acquisition is arguably the most complex type of learning. It has your brain firing on all cylinders: storing and retrieving vocabulary from your declarative memory, engaging your procedural knowledge by applying grammar rules in real time, producing a variety of sounds with your mouth in rapid-fire succession, and interpreting pragmatic cues like tone and context to respond appropriately to the concrete situation.

Most learning and reference material is only able to support the development of one or another of these skills in the target language. Indeed, while a dictionary is useful for cross-referencing vocabulary, it remains an impractical way to learn new terms. Textbooks are more practical in that they provide vocabulary lists and guidance about syntax as well, but, while they provide some linguistic input in the form of example sentences, they can’t offer the auditory input that is so key to developing listening skills and, by extension, refining phonemic distinctions in production.

Ideally, these materials would be used within the context of a course with a speaker of the language or on the ground, but this is not always possible. Besides, even within the context of a course, teachers are not available 24/7 to clarify doubts, while language use in the real world is naturally unstructured and constantly raises new questions (e.g. when a speaker uses a word that the listener hasn’t heard before).

PalWeb

That’s why I created PalWeb. PalWeb is the Web of Palestinian Arabic, not only because it’s a website for learning the Palestinian dialect of Spoken Arabic, but because the site is built around a dictionary wherein each term is a node within the entangled web that is language itself. Using a hypertext system similar to Wikipedia, users can navigate seamlessly between pages of the Dictionary. Terms link to each other through a variety of relationships (e.g. synonyms, passive forms, idiom components, etc.) and are tagged in detail to enable powerful and practical search functions.

More than just a dictionary, PalWeb is an interactive knowledge base built using custom-made documentation tools. Sentences are not manually written static strings but rather chains of database objects, enabling users to navigate to and between any of their component parts; in turn, every meaning of every term is loaded with all its usages within the Phrasebook. With an onsite recording application, thousands of pronunciation samples have been sourced as well, so that users can not only see terms in context but hear them spoken out loud by native speakers as well.

And that’s only the reference functionality. PalWeb is also a web of language-learning pals. Create an account to pin terms and sentences you want to review, collect terms into custom flashcard decks, or study with other users’ creations. More is still on the horizon, as the Academy section of the application is still being built; expect dynamically generated quizzes, score and progress tracking, and a zero-to-hero course coming within the next year, with plenty of surprises — as always — along the way.

What I love about interdisciplinary projects like PalWeb and Aralects is that they are uniquely capable of breathing fresh air into language pedagogy by leveraging modern practices from a variety of fields. ChristianChristian KhairallahChristian Khairallah, founder of Aralects! is a computational linguist that worked on Maknuune, a Palestinian Arabic lexicography project that I — a language tutor turned full-stack web developer — am using as one of my main references for the PalWeb Dictionary.

Moreover, language pedagogy is so broad that projects like these synergize rather than compete, be it with each other or with traditional modes of instruction and learning. Neither PalWeb nor Aralects replace an in-person course with an instructor, or immersion for that matter, but rather complement them, while also democratizing language learning for those with limited access to traditional resources — the Web is for everyone!