Arabic is an important global language with a rich history, says Hanada Taha Thomure, an internationally known Arabic teaching and learning expert, but schools and universities need to update how they teach it in light of what Arab youth need today.
Hanada Taha Thomure is an endowed professor of the Arabic language at the United Arab Emirates’ Zayed University and director of its Zai Centre, a pioneering new research centre the university opened last year to focus on Arabic teaching and learning.
She spoke to Al-Fanar Media on December 18, the date designated by the United Nations as World Arabic Language Day, which coincides with the anniversary of the organisation’s adoption of Arabic as one of its official languages in 1973.
Taha Thomure has 30 years’ experience in developing Arabic language curricula and teaching the language to native and non-native speakers. Publishers have used a system she designed for identifying the difficulty level of Arabic children’s books. She also helped develop Arabic language teaching standards that have been used by over 100,000 Arab students.
The world’s current focus on catastrophic destruction the Israel-Hamas war is causing in Gaza have increased global interest in Arabic, she said, but “this interest has been going on for some time. Of course, things fade and shine again. There is an ebb and flow.”
Soft Power
Taha Thomure, who is also head of Arabic Language Programmes at San Diego State University, in the United States, believes that Arabic is a global language. “I know that her children sometimes consider it unimportant, and that English is more important,” she said.
“But Arabic is global in terms of the number of its speakers, and the influence and strength of languages. It is one of the world’s most powerful languages, regardless of our countries’ internal problems. We are talking about millions of Arabic speakers and Muslims. In total, it reaches about 1.2 billion speakers.”
She also noted that that Arabic and Chinese are among a dozen languages designated as “critical need” languages in the United States and the United Kingdom. “They are very important languages for them. Politically, strategically, militarily, say whatever you want about the reasons.”
“Arabic is global in terms of the number of its speakers, and the influence and strength of languages. It is one of the world’s most powerful languages, regardless of our countries’ internal problems. We are talking about millions of Arabic speakers and Muslims. In total, it reaches about 1.2 billion speakers.”
Hanada Taha Thomure, director of the Zai Centre for Arabic
teaching and learning at Zayed University
That critical need makes mastery of Arabic an important soft power that Arabic teachers sometimes forget to use, she says. In Western countries, “in certain professions, in the army or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, those who speak Arabic can get an increase in their salary as an additional incentive,” she said. “This can range between $800 and $1,000 per month.”
She also believes that English has reached its maximum power in economic terms and that Arabic has great opportunities. “The question is how to use it, because like social media, it can be used for trivia or to communicate important issues.”
Artificial Intelligence Applications
Taha Thomure believes Arabic has huge possibilities in emerging fields like artificial intelligence that have yet to be explored.
“As with all tools since the invention of the pen, the calculator, and the computer, we face similar questions: Will it be harmful?” she said. “We cannot stop the progress of development, we must keep pace with it. Artificial intelligence is a tool that, if we work with it properly, will be a means of progress and prosperity for the Arabic language.”
To show how AI technologies can help improve the process of teaching Arabic, she cited the Zai Centre’s Smart Arabic Reading Diagnostic tool, or SARD, which is used to assess students’ reading difficulties in Arabic.
“We noticed that students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and even university level, struggled with reading and lacked depth of comprehension,” she said.
Experts at the Zai Centre developed SARD in cooperation with educators, cognitive psychologists, linguists, and AI experts, she said. The tool diagnoses 16 reading-related fluency skills that every Arabic language learner needs to master.
“We are now in an experimental phase,” Taha Thomure said. “We are working in several countries, in Saudi, Lebanese, and Emirati schools. Jordan and Morocco are currently talking to us because we want to try it on a wide segment to legitimise it.”
“Preparing Arabic teachers and educators takes place in a box that a giant threw into the sea a thousand years ago. … There is nothing wrong with [teaching ancient literature and poetry], but teachers must be able to deal with today’s students, know their fears and concerns, and what controls their thinking.”
Hanada Taha Thomure
SARD tests students via the computer, so they receive a detailed report with the number of seconds they took to read specific content, she said. The tool also tests cognitive skills, revealing whether the student has from memory problems that affect understanding, or something else. “We are working on three other tools about reading and predicting cognitive difficulties in language,” she said.
Arabic Language and Today’s Youth
Hanada, who has also served as dean of the Teachers College at the University of Bahrain, believes that universities need to update their curricula for training Arabic-language teachers.
“Higher education is the biggest dinosaur that lives in an era and contexts irrelevant to the young student,” she said. “In general, preparing Arabic teachers and educators takes place in a box that a giant threw into the sea a thousand years ago. We are still in the same box, using its contents.”
Arabic teacher-training programmes still focus on ancient literature and poetry, and “there is nothing wrong with that,” she said. “But teachers must be able to deal with today’s students, know their fears and concerns, and what controls their thinking.”
Many students believe that to get a good job with a good salary, they need to learn English, Taha Thomure said. This is not necessarily because English is better, she said, but more because learning Arabic does not necessarily lead to good educational outcomes. Skill in Arabic must become linked to a good job and a good salary she argues.
Standards for Teaching Arabic
Taha Thomure contributed to developing modern standards for teaching Arabic in schools. Arabic should not be taught as a historical, grammar-based language, but a living one, she says.
The new standards set out 10 criteria for teaching. The old standards—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—are not enough, she says. “We are talking about the Arabic language for life, and therefore I added standards such as speaking in front of an audience, in order to persuade, influence, disagree and argue.
“I also added standards related to literary texts and scientific texts, as Arabic suits everything; science, geography, history, and artificial intelligence,” she said.
“For primary school students, I decided that their curricula should have 50 percent scientific texts, and 50 percent literary and fictional texts. As pupils reach secondary school, the percentage of scientific and informational texts increases to 70 percent, compared to 30 percent for literary texts, poetry and fiction, since we are preparing students for life, work and career, and to read a report and a bank statement.”
“My work always begins with a problem. Fifteen years ago, I noticed that children’s literature was too difficult in its language and topics. …. Authors think they are writing for children, but in fact they are writing for adults.”
Hanada Taha Thomure
“The idea of the standards came from my observation of hundreds of classrooms and what happens in them,” she said. She noticed that instruction varied “from class to class, from curriculum to curriculum, and from book to book,” so that what various students learned was very different. “This is unfair. We all need to have a solid common ground in the Arabic language, which is high quality and modern, similar to what students get in other languages.”
Taha Thomure’s standards also take into account students’ needs in the digital age. For example, she believes students should be able to compare conflicting texts, and do research to discover which is based on information and facts. Young people need to be able to analyse the reliability of sources and identify fake news, she said.
Classifying Children’s Literature
Taha Thomure has also helped develop a system for classifying children’s literature, which was adopted by the Arab Thought Foundation and used to classify 10,000 children’s books. “My work always begins with a problem,” she said. “Fifteen years ago, I noticed that children’s literature was too difficult in its language and topics. Authors think they are writing for children, but in fact they are writing for adults.”
She started following research on how to write for children, and drew on her own experience as a teacher. “I started my life as a teacher for third-grade primary school students, an experience I will never forget. My children were young at the time, so I could see their cognitive and linguistic development.”
She remembers one text she used to study when she was young, which read, “Father, ears of corn teach us humility.” She wonders how a six-year-old who has never seen an ear of corn can understand such a text.
“A six-year-old needs a joke or something light-hearted.”
With funding from the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, Taha Thomure and colleagues from New York University Abu Dhabi are using artificial intelligence techniques at the ZAI Centre to classify the level of difficulty of Arabic texts.
Related Reading
- Website Seeks to Show ‘How Alive Arabic Is’
- It Is Time to Deal with Arabic’s Diglossia
- An Educator and Translator Confronts a Decline in Teaching Arabic
- Universities Seek to Improve Their Teaching of Arabic to Non-Native Speakers
