Arabic I A/B

Learning Outcomes

Arabic I A/B

This course has been designed to develop basic language skills in Arabic: listening, speaking, reading and writing, as well as a basic understanding and assimilation of the Arab culture in general. Since Arabic has such diverse dialects: the Levantine Dialect (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian), the Iraqi D., the Arabian D., the Arabian peninsula D., the Egyptian D. (Egypt and Sudan), and the North African D. (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco); we will be using a variant of Arabic known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which strongly resembles Fushaa (meaning “The most beautiful, the most eloquent, and the purest.”)

All students are required to learn the written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by the ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages), which represents an indispensable linguistic foundation for successful communication with speakers of any colloquial variant (Colloquial Arabic or Dialects). It is worthwhile to mention that MSA is used all over the world in classroom instruction, electronic and print media, scientific research and many other formal situations. Moreover, a good foundation in MSA allows the learner not only to have access to a vast heritage of ancient and modern literature, scholarly work and various types of media, but also facilitates the learning process itself and the time devoted to any Dialect the student may wish to acquire in the future. All of the ‘Aammiyyah (Dialect), known collectively as colloquial Arabic (CA), contain base words, segments, expressions, idioms, structures, and cultural references from Formal Standard Arabic. Therefore, learning colloquial utterances involves applying deletion rather than augmentation rules as rightly studied by numerous Dialectology linguists. Therefore, the instructor will incorporate some elements of the Levantine and the Egyptian Dialects