The Experience of Young Arabic Learners in a British Context

1.1 Introduction

The following passage pinpoints the research proposal and findings of the present study. First of all, the factors influencing Arabic learning have been analyzed briefly with regard to the research findings. Secondly, some recommendations on how learners may be approached in the future have been summarized taking inspiration from this research. Thirdly, a summary of my feelings about this experience during this study will be presented, including the personal and professional development that I achieved through this research. Eventually, a discussion on the dissemination of the research will be provided.

1.2 Factors influencing Arabic learning

The current study has attempted to look into the experience of five Arabic learners in a British context. The results and discussion presented in previous chapter lead to several conclusions and inferences.

With respect to factors that affect Arabic understanding, this study concludes that age is an important element. Exposure to Arabic at early age and consistent strategies to teach and learn Arabic that are aligned with increase in age leads to increase in language acquisition. All of the participants, as stated at the beginning of the research, are aged 11-14 meaning that all of them are within their ‘neurological plasticity phase’. This allows individuals to virtually acquire an unlimited repertoire of information with minimal or no effort.

Furthermore, this study also acknowledges that social class and ethnicity as well is a factor which has significant influence over the young Arabic learners. One of the participants in particular, Noor, demonstrated a better proficiency in the use of both written and spoken Arabic, if compared to the rest of the group. This may be a reflection of her parents’ social status, being both educated at higher level.

The results also present empirical evidence to conclude that the individual aptitude of students for learning a second language is considered to be a relevant factor. A positive aptitude and a vivid interest in the task involved would definitely lead to better results, with little expenses in terms of energy and time. All the participants in this research have stated to enjoy speaking or reading Arabic as this would allow them to create a stronger bond with their relatives. At the present date, there is no consensus on whether aptitude is innate or can be developed. Also, the mutability of aptitude may depend on having the pre-existing knowledge of other languages as this would considerably facilitate the learning of a new one through the application of similar developed strategies of communication.

This study also concludes that students’ motivation towards language acquisition as well as towards teaching methods and techniques are also influencing factors. The underlying logic is simple that attitudes are based on motivations (Oxford, 2016). Although this study does not explain how to distinguish the effect that attitudes have on the acquisition of second languages from the one with the motivation, yet there is clear evidence that motivated students are more likely to succeed. The motivation, this study concludes, is also linked with the degree of competence of the learners which vary from person to person.

The results also provide evidence to support the conclusion that Arabic learning has personal, social, cultural and economic advantages. In case of primary data the results show that Arabic can provide students a competitive advantage in their professional careers in both private and public sectors. Learning Arabic helps to improve communication skills and cultural intelligence which is critical for both public and private sector professionals in modern globalised world. Modern employers prefer bilingual professionals over monolinguals and knowledge and ability to use more than one language is considered to improve chances of getting a job. Although the literature shows that these benefits are generally applicable for any language and therefore this study extends and apply these conclusions in case of Arabic within the UK context. It is also important to note that due to economic benefits the British Council has already suggested to make Arabic as a subject in UK schools.

Furthermore, a good understanding of the Arabic calligraphy may expand individuals’ visual experience beyond the glyphs and forms (Elmansy, 2014). Learning the Arabic calligraphy was thought to be meditative which seems to relax people’s minds. Also, more benefits have been identified such as creativity build-up (by lettering with a different colour, slant, angle, size, with new or different elements), developing manual dexterity skills, increasing attention span (being more careful when hand-writing letters and spelling) and fostering patience, as it requires lots of repetitive practice (Husting, 2017).

Therefore, this study concludes that there are several advantages for young Arabic learners in the UK.

1.3 Implications

The results of this research indicate that, unfortunately, the number of appointments arranged between the researcher and the participants may have not been sufficient to provide more detailed and secure conclusions. The limited time available and the many daily commitments from both the sides made the research a slightly difficult process.

Furthermore, the lack of many activities and events promoting Arabic learning seems to have negatively impacted on the participants, who found it difficult to answer some of the questions they were presented with, also failing to provide more interesting facts or share experiences that would be otherwise worth analyzing (e.g. for some of the participants, not having ever travelled to their country of origin).

1.4 Recommendations

This study inspired a number of recommendations for parents of children to play an effective role in development of Arabic language skills in young learners in the UK. Following are some of the commonly used methods and strategies to enhance second language skills of young children.

The first thing that parents need to understand is that they must differentiate between social and academic language. The development of the first, necessary in informal interactions does not require much time, but the process of acquiring the academic language lasts much longer. Learning a language is a complex process that takes many years and the environment of the child plays an important role (Samovar et al., 2015). Children acquire language through their interactions with other people and these experiences can vary greatly from one child to another. The acquisition of vocabulary is crucial in this process, because the more words parents know the better parents can develop language. This also influences good performance at school (Abalkhail and Allan, 2015).

Parents and caregivers of children can help a lot in this process, whether it is in one of the languages or in both. They can even help them with their homework, even if they do not speak the language in which a subject is taught at school. The knowledge that children acquire in any of their languages is transferred from one to the other (Yilmaz, 2016). There are no tailor-made tips on how to do it, as there are many ways to support them. As each child and each family context is different, parents must decide in what language they want, or can, help. Here are some ideas and suggestions. All of them can be carried out in one language as in the other (Nydell, 2018)

1.4.1 Recommendations

The quantity and quality of the language used at home is positively correlated with the vocabulary that children acquire. The more they are spoken, using a varied and decontextualized vocabulary, and the more they are encouraged to speak, the better they will learn to express their thoughts and feelings. Decontextualized language refers to what goes beyond the here and now, or to the present facts (Almalki and Ganong, 2018). Examples of this language are explanations, definitions, narratives or that which is used in dramatization through theatre, but also simply communication that does not use non-verbal communication (gestures, pointing, etc.) to support communication. Using it, the child is given the opportunity to learn new words and meanings and this, in turn, is related to the acquisition of reading and writing, essential for future academic development (Alrashidi and Phan, 2015).

Although it may seem obvious, not all parents talk a lot with their children, especially before they turn two. In one study, Meredith Rowe, a university professor and researcher, found that the number of words that parents use in a 90-minute interaction with their 18-month-old children can vary enormously51. Some of the parents in the study, only used 360 words while others more than 9,200. When the children were 30 months old, some of the parents did not use any narrative phrase during, again, a 90-minute interaction (Samovar, et al., 2015). Others, however, used more than 250. Narrative language is understood as that used to talk about the past and the future. Although the amount of language is important, quality is even more important. It has also been proven that employing both a diverse and sophisticated vocabulary and a decontextualized language when speaking with a young child has an impact on the development of children's vocabulary when they are somewhat older (Alrashidi and Phan, 2015).

1.4.2 Tell Personal Stories

Daily conversations between parents and children often deal with the here and now. When parents talk more with their children about the past and the future, they create a way for children to hear and use language in a variety of larger contexts. Furthermore, in this type of interactions, communication is not supported by elements present in the context, so it is necessary to express oneself more precisely (Dörnyei, 2014). Question 11 already mentioned a study that proved the importance of telling stories at home. Telling personal stories is another option to develop decontextualised language because it involves talking about past experiences and future events. Parents can tell stories of when they were little or encourage the child to tell their own stories Zarrinabadi, (2014).

1.4.3 Ask Questions

By asking them questions, children are helped to expand their knowledge and develop their language. Open questions, more appropriate than those that only require a yes or no answer, invite conversation and encourage reasoning and explanation. By showing interest in what they say and asking, children can be encouraged to give more elaborate and complex answers (Alrabai, 2015).

1.4.4 Read Books and Stories

It is recommended to read books with small children and tell them stories. Reading together is an excellent source for the development of language and communication skills. It helps them acquire a more varied and richer vocabulary because they learn words that are not often used in daily interactions between parents and children (Dewaele and Al-Saraj, 2015). Parents can read the stories out loud and comment on them in the meantime. In this way the child has an active role and both immediate speech and non-immediate speech are encouraged. The first one refers to talking about the words and illustrations in the book and the information that can be obtained from there. For example, a picture of a house is drawn, and the child is asked "Who lives in this house?" Or is asked to describe it in detail. Non-immediate speech is another example of decontextualized language and goes beyond the content of the book or story (Gass and Glew, 2018). It occurs when reading is used to, for example, tell personal stories or to explain or start talking about the meaning of some words. Parents can use what parents have just read as the starting point of a conversation. Seeing the image of the house of favourite character in the story, parents can ask the child "who do parents think would like to live there too?" And encourage him to make his answers more and more extensive and complex. Finally, children love to listen to or see stories more than once and repetition is another factor that favours expanding their vocabulary (Oxford, 2016).

1.4.5 An Environment that Stimulates Reading and Vocabulary

Parents can create an environment that favours learning to read and expand the vocabulary. They can hang on the walls of different places of the house drawings or posters with images or words in any of the child's languages. One idea may be to choose the 'word of the week' and look for that word or object at home or on the street when the purchase is being made. In this way, learning new words becomes fun. Another idea is to use magnetic letters in the fridge and let the child decipher the words, or write small words himself (Albirini, 2015).

1.4.6 Learn To Play at Home

When only one language is spoken at home, but the parents also know the other language of the boy or girl, they can play with him or her in that language, even for 10 minutes a day. They can tell parents that they will play every day speaking in the other language and choose a specific corner inside the house and give it the name of, for example, the English corner. There they can tell a story, sing songs or simply say rhymes (Ortega, 2014). The board games like Scrabble, the hangman or I see, I see are other examples of fun activities that allow parents to practice the language with the child. The specialised bookstores in languages often also have a lot of educational material and games in that language for children. Another option is the large number of Web pages that contain games that can be done together (Yilmaz, 2016).

1.4.7 Show that Parents Value the Language

Some parents will not be able to interact with the children in the foreign language, and not even dedicate those times of play to speaking in the foreign language because they do not speak the language, or because their level in it is very limited. Even so, these parents can positively influence the learning of the foreign language in their children if they show the value they give to the language (Abalkhail and Allan, 2015). For this they can ask that the children themselves teach them words or songs and rhymes in the foreign language, they can make an effort to use the foreign language when traveling, be interested in the culture of the country where the language is spoken, or even take classes of foreign language. The very attitude towards language is a very important factor for the motivation that children develop to learn a foreign language (Nydell, 2018).

1.4.8 Expert Assistance

If the parents do not speak the (future) second language of the child, they can also seek outside help and thus create opportunities for them to practice the new language. Teenagers or college students with good language skills can come regularly home and play with him or her. Another possibility is to hire an au-pair (Hervey, Dickins and Higgins, 2016). There are many boys or girls who want to come to Spain to learn the language and there are agencies that can help find this type of services. Not only do they provide contact with their language and culture, but they can also play with them or help them with their homework (Samovar, et al., 2015).

1.4.9 Television and DVD

Television programs and DVDs, carefully selected, can serve as complements to the input and to stimulate the development of the language. Children like to see them and are a source to enrich the vocabulary. However, they are a passive medium and cannot substitute interaction with other speakers of the language (Alrashidi and Phan, 2015). More interesting, but also more difficult due to the lack of visual support, are audio books and CDs with songs and rhymes for children. There is also a lot of audio material accessible through the Internet, which can be an excellent source of language beyond the interaction at school or with people who speak the foreign language (Zarrinabadi, 2014).

1.4.10 Talk about School

When the children begin their bilingual education at school, they will have many new experiences to share with their parents. Sometimes they may not have the necessary vocabulary to explain them in their mother tongue. Xiao-lei Wang, author of the book’ growing up with Three Languages to which reference was made in question 6, explains several ideas that she and her husband used with their trilingual children (Dewaele and Al-Saraj, 2015). One of them is to acquire some books or stories that deal with children at school in the language that children do not use at school. The story can be used to learn the school vocabulary, unknown in the mother tongue. Parents can also ask the teacher or the teacher of the child what the daily routines are and discuss them with the child in the afternoon when he is already at home (Oxford, 2016). For example, parents can say: "Surely today parents have ... at school" and encourage him to count more by helping him with the vocabulary. Another option is to draw a picture of what parents have done that day. Then, the parents can talk with the child about the drawing, giving him, once again, the necessary vocabulary. No importance should be given to the child mixing the two languages during these times. The context will help parents understand what they want to say. Repeating it later in the mother tongue will help the child to also acquire the vocabulary in his first language (Ortega, 2014).

1.4.11 Help with Homework

At certain times children may need help with their homework. Depending on the competence of the parents in the second language of the school, they can help parents in that language or not. Parents who do not know the language often believe that this is why they will not be able to help their children. However, they can also give support in the subject using the mother tongue. Doing it this way will even facilitate the transfer of vocabulary and concepts from one language to the other (Yilmaz, 2016). They can ask their son or daughter to explain the new concepts in their mother tongue, helping them with the vocabulary when necessary. Students in the upper grades do not usually have problems explaining the subject in their mother tongue and if there is a word that causes problems they look for it in the dictionary. With the youngest children, parents can see the textbooks or the school material of the subject before beginning to help them. This way they already have an idea of the subject in question and can anticipate the vocabulary they will need (Nydell, 2018). Buying a similar textbook in mother tongue can also be a solution because their parents will find the specific vocabulary that may be needed. Having dictionaries on hand can be useful for searching for words that are not known in one of the languages. Mixing the languages should not cause problems when, at some point, neither of them finds the exact word in the other language (Hervey, Dickins and Higgins, 2016). When it comes to helping with homework, understanding the subject or concepts is more important than language. When possible, it is paraphrased in the mother tongue so that, little by little, the child will learn how to express ideas in this language (Samovar, et al., 2015).

1.5 Personal and professional development

This study has given me some insights into how subjective the experience of learning a second language in a different context can be. I appreciate that most of the interviewees are really committed in their Arabic learning process and seem to be successful students. Moreover, I acknowledge that every participant is different, taking into consideration their social, economic and academic status and learning how to be equal and impartial in front of each participant. I noticed how hands-on experiments can really be challenging and involving, conferring a stronger sense of responsibility if compared to merely descriptive researches.

1.6 Dissemination

I would like to divulgate the findings obtained from this study as a method to contribute to other researchers’ studies. Since I believe that they may well benefit from this work, my plan is to make use of online university platforms and local authorities and institutions to make it available for both linguists and anyone nourishing an interest in this field. In this respect, the Internet and social networks also plays a crucial role as the findings of this study can be shared with other teachers of foreign languages whose feedback may be precious. I may share these findings in conferences, seminars or at academic meetings, with other pioneers of the field.

1.7 Summary

From my experience as an Arabic teacher I can say the main method and interesting idea of Arabic language for being teach at school, is learning the Arabic calligraphy, which can improve the learners’ abilities to be calligraphers and artists. ‘Let us listen to Picasso, the pioneer of modern painting, who says: The maximum I have reached in the art of drawing and found Arabic calligraphy preceded me long ago ( Abeer, 2011).

Arabic calligraphy is one course that is really enjoyable and which has been observed to be enjoyed even by people who did not have previous knowledge of the Arabic language. An introduction to the basics and to the script of that alphabet is always necessary before a student embarks on properly teaching Arabic. In learning calligraphy, even people who are fluent speakers of Arabic, often, get to know about something they did not know previously about the language (Azmi et al., 2011). Very little of the script is taught in the early school tears. It is worth noting that as formal as Arabic calligraphy is, it requires long and repetitive calligraphy for one to be in a position to learn them and even draw them properly. For one to be able to express themselves using Arabic calligraphy takes even more time. Most calligraphy student actually lose interest long before they have put enough practice to make anything of it. That is the reason why across the globe today, very few people have fully mastered Arabic calligraphy.

There seem to be enough evidence to support and encourage the teaching of the Arabic language in the academic institutions of the United Kingdom. Future arrangements from the British government should, therefore, be taken into consideration.

The primary data analyses also lead to the conclusion that in order to improve Arabic teaching and promotion of Arabic as a regular subject in the UK education system, the first and foremost step is to develop an adequate policy and specific plan. One of the most important aspects in the policy is to ensure that there is specialised staff who has sufficient skills in Arabic and sufficient teaching skills. There is also a need to provide adequate resources to promote Arabic as a secondary language in the UK education system and to promote it like other languages such as French.

Finally, it is important to mention that the findings in previous chapter and conclusions drawn in previous section are found to have high level of consistency with past studies. A number of researchers have drawn similar conclusions and findings and these findings have been discussed. Therefore, this study provides high quality ethnographic based research evidence to stress upon the need to promote Arabic as a subject in the UK schools.

References

• Ali, A. (2011). The aesthetic of Arabic calligraphy from career writing to art and beauty. London Al- Arabia newspaper.
• Abalkhail, J. M., and Allan, B. (2015). Women’s career advancement: mentoring and networking in Saudi Arabia and the UK. Human Resource Development International, 18(2), 153-168.
• Albirini, A. (2015). Factors affecting the acquisition of plural morphology in Jordanian Arabic. Journal of child language, 42(4), 734-762.
• Almalki, S., and Ganong, L. (2018). Family life education in Saudi Arabia. In Global perspectives on family life education (pp. 381-396). Springer, Cham.
• Alrashidi, O., and Phan, H. (2015). Education context and English teaching and learning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: An overview. English Language Teaching, 8(5), 33.
• Azmi, M.S., Omar, K., Nasrudin, M.F., Muda, A.K. and Abdullah, A., 2011, December. Arabic calligraphy classification using triangle model for digital jawi paleography analysis. In Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS), 2011 11th International Conference on (pp. 704-708). IEEE.
• Dewaele, J. M., and Al-Saraj, T. M. (2015). Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety of Arab learners of English: The effect of personality, linguistic and sociobiographical variables. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 5(2), 205-228.
• Elmansy, I. (2014). Arabic Calligraphy – Taking A Closer Look.
• Gass, S., & Glew, M. (2018). Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism. An introduction to bilingualism: Principles and processes.
• Hervey, S., Dickins, J., and Higgins, I. (2016). Thinking Arabic translation: A course in translation method: Arabic to English. Routledge.
• Husting, S. (2017). What are the benefits of writing calligraphy? https://www.stevehusting.com/calligraphy/2017/11/24/what-are-the-benefits-of-calligraphy/ [Last accessed: 27/11/2018].
• Nydell, M. K. (2018). Understanding Arabs: A guide for modern times. Hachette UK.
• Ortega, L. (2014). Understanding second language acquisition. Routledge.
• Oxford, R. L. (2016). Teaching and researching language learning strategies: Self-regulation in context. Routledge.
• Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. E., McDaniel, E. R., and Roy, C. S. (2015). Communication between cultures. Nelson Education.
• Yilmaz, I. (2016). Muslim laws, politics and society in modern nation states: Dynamic legal pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan. Routledge.
• Zarrinabadi, N. (2014). Communicating in a second language: Investigating the effect of teacher on learners' willingness to communicate. System, 42, 288-295.