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Arabic: more accesible than you think
Arabic is in great demand and there’s a shortage of well-qualified speakers
Ten years ago last week, I started my first graduate job in the UK civil service, where I began studying Arabic on a 15-month intensive course for translators. This was my dream job: studying another language full-time and being paid a decent salary, too. Now, in my freelance work translating and teaching Arabic, I aim to give English speakers access to an unfamiliar world, a vibrant culture, and a perspective on history and politics that we rarely see in our western media.
My experience shows that not only is Arabic much more accessible than many people think, but it is also in great demand. The fact that several government departments, the armed forces and many businesses are prepared to pay for their employees to study it to an advanced level because of the severe shortage of Arabic graduates, shows that for schools and students alike, there are many good reasons to choose Arabic. This is all the more true now that the Qatar Foundation and the British Council are offering grants to support schools wishing to introduce Arabic.
As one of the six official UN languages, Arabic can be a real boost for careers in international organisations and diplomacy, as well as journalism, tourism and international trade, particularly the energy industry. Ten universities in the UK have Arabic departments: if you’re considering your future career, a joint honours degree with Arabic is an excellent choice if you want to develop skills that set you apart.
One common written language, countless spoken varieties
Arabic is not the language of one country, of course, but of 26 nations across North Africa and the Middle East. It is a language that unites at least 400 million native speakers in the Arab world, as well as being something of a lingua franca of Muslims worldwide. However, I tend to warn my beginner students that there isn’t really one language called Arabic, and if you want to get anywhere, you’re actually going to need to dabble in two languages side by side: the standard written language, known as fus-ha (الفصحى, literally: ‘the purest’), and one of the local spoken dialects, which vary a lot more in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammatical structures from one region to another than tends to be the case with other languages.
Written Arabic is revered as the language of the Quran and therefore of the Islamic faith, and as such it has changed remarkably little since the Middle Ages. Arabic students can enjoy seventh-century poetry without too much exertion, which is impressive considering the challenge that even 17th-century writers such as Shakespeare pose to English speakers.
Literacy is important, but don’t neglect the spoken dialect
It is the rather stiff-sounding fusha, aka Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), that is the starting point for most students of Arabic as a foreign language. You need it to develop academically, to read, to write, and use a dictionary. But if you want to speak Arabic on holiday or do business beyond simple pleasantries, you also need to learn a local dialect. If you try speaking fusha in the souq, unless you can throw in the odd bit of colloquial Arabicto pitch yourself at the right register, you risk coming across as the old Etonian spy inCaptain Corelli’s Mandolin in Greece, who tries chatting to the locals in Ancient Greek. Your haggling will get you a much better bargain, and probably make you a friend for life, if you can show that you’ve tried to learn at least a smattering of the local lingo. Films and pop music are the best ways to train your ear to the dialect of your choosing. The Arabic Music Translation blog is a treasure trove I plundered heavily when I had the pleasure of teaching an introductory Egyptian Arabic course to a troupe of English bellydancers!
In fusha, to ask someone their name you’d say ‘maa ismuka?’ whereas Syrians would ask ‘shoo ismak?’ and for Egyptians it’s ‘ismak ay?’ This example demonstrates how keywords like ‘what’ differ between dialects, and how the grammatical endings are simplified in spoken Arabic, making it much easier to learn than written MSA. For that reason, I’d always recommend a student dip into spoken Arabic first, with material like the Michel Thomas audio course for Egyptian or BBC Talk Arabic for colloquial Levantine.
The pronunciation of certain letters varies between dialects. For example, camel (جمل) in MSA and Eastern Arabic is ‘jamal’, but in Egypt it’s ‘gamal’. But because of the cross-border pervasiveness of exports such as Lebanese pop music, Egyptian films and the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera, Arabs tend to be familiar with the rudiments of each other’s dialects, just as people in the UK understand US English. Imagine a heavily accented Glaswegian talking to someone from The Wire (the gritty American television drama) – challenging, but not impossible. While we’re talking about camels, incidentally, the cliché that Arabic has a thousand words for camel might be a slight exaggeration, but this list of related words is staggering all the same.
Arabic is deeply entwined with our European heritage
The language of the Arabs spread outwards from the Hijaz, modern Saudi Arabia, with the conquests by the Islamic Empire. The heritage of Moorish Andalusia still lingers in many Spanish words and place names, and indeed British ones: Gibraltar is a name that evolved from ‘Jabal Tariq’ (جبل طارق) or ‘Tariq’s mountain’. Portugal’s Algarve comes from ‘al-gharb’ (الغرب) meaning ‘the west’ – literally the western-most point of the Islamic Caliphate. It was this rich era of cultural trade alongside the trade of spices and exotic goods that brought the English the words ‘saffron’ (fromأصفر, asfar, yellow), ‘cotton’ (قطن, qutn), ‘coffee’ (from قهوة, qahwa), ‘magazine’ (from مخازن, makhazin, storerooms), and algebra (الجبر, al-jabr) and alcohol (الكحول, al-kuhool), which include ‘al’, the Arabic prefix meaning ‘the’. But the trade of words isn’t all one way, of course. An orange is a ‘burtuqaal’ (برتقال) after Portugal, not unlike our word tangerine from Tangiers. Students are often relieved to find a wealth of English and French words in Arabic, with slight mutations as neither ‘p’ nor ‘v’ exist as sounds in Arabic.
Culturally speaking, modern Europe wouldn’t be what it is today without the impact of medieval Arab civilisation, which had preserved, translated and expanded on texts in various science and humanities disciplines. For example, it is largely due to the scholars ofBaghdad’s House of Wisdom that much of Aristotle survived to be reintroduced in Europe.
Arabic is very unlike Indo-European languages, but easier to learn than you’d think
Like Hebrew, Arabic is a Semitic language and calls on European learners to step outside some of their Indo-European assumptions about how a language should fit together. That said, at a beginner’s level it is an unusually accessible language, with a very simple grammar.
Arabic only has two tenses (past and present) and it dispenses with the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense, as it is understood without being said. I couldn’t believe my luck once when I realised there was an Esme and an Anna in one of my beginners’ groups. Cue much hilarity when they learnt their first two phrases: ‘ismee Esme’ (اسمي ismee = ‘my name’ or ‘my name is’) and “Ana Anna” (أنا ana = ‘I’ or ‘I am’). If only we’d had a Heather too and could say ‘haatha Heather!’ (هذا, haatha = ‘this’ or ‘this is’).
There is also an organic beauty to be found in the language’s highly logical root letter system. Almost every Arabic verb has three core letters from which a multitude of related nouns and adjectives are derived. So, from the letters ‘k’, ‘t’ and ‘b’ (ك ت ب), you get the verb to write (kataba, كتَبَ), and the nouns book (kitaab, كِتَاب), office (maktab, مَكتَب), library (maktabah, مَكتَبة), and writer (kaatib, كاتِب). This gives Arabic learners a real boost: if you know one word from a certain root, you have a short cut to recognising and deciphering new vocabulary which is related (albeit sometimes at a deep and murky philosophical level).
The Arabic alphabet is easier to grasp than it looks
Arabic is written from right to left, and a book begins at what looks like the back for us. Though the script may look like loopy squiggles to an untrained eye, my experience of teaching it is that learning to read and write isn’t as huge a challenge as most people expect. The bit that really messes with your brain is when you encounter numbers in an Arabic text, because they are read from left to right, like English! The alphabet begins in familiar territory with the letters alif (أ), ba (ب) ta (ت), just like the Greek ‘alpha beta’. There are 28 letters, but in fact, there are half as many distinct letter shapes to learn, because many shapes form the basis for two or three different letters, with the number of dots above or below the letter being the distinguishing feature, as is the case with the ‘ba’ and ‘ta’ above.
There are no capital letters and there’s no need to write down short vowels, just as you might use only consonants when texting the word ‘tmrw’. If you really need to display the short vowels, you use little markers above and below the consonants. These feature in children’s books and textbooks for foreigners, but with time it is presumed that you recognise words from the context and no longer need these helping vowel markers. They are only used to remove ambiguity, such as on Twitter to distinguish between ‘follower’ (متابِع mutaabi’) and ‘followee’ ( متابَع mutaaba’).
So many reasons to learn Arabic and so many ways to approach it
The largest group of Arabic learners worldwide are Muslims seeking to understand their holy text, the Quran. But with ever-increasing numbers taking it up for business, personal or academic reasons, there is a flourishing market of teaching materials focusing on communicative language. Many present a fusion of spoken fusha and more colloquial phrases, such as this excellent EU course for business, tourism and schools, and the loveable ArabicPod podcasts.
For a taste of Arabic literature, look to the blog ArabLit (in English) as your guide, and to the online journals Words without Borders and Asymptote to read stories and extracts of novels with the Arabic original alongside the English translation. These sites often include an audio recording of the Arabic, too. The Arab British Centre’s annual Safar film fest, London’s Shubbak Arabic arts festival and the Liverpool Arab Arts festival all make fantastic routes into the cinema, music and cuisine of this rich and diverse part of the world.
Arabic is a written language and a cultural identity that unites a somewhat disparate group of nations. Though local dialects vary, standard Arabic is the foundation on which all these colloquial variants are based, and learning it opens a window onto an incredible range of places and cultures. With so many reasons to learn and so many ways to approach it, why not give it a go? أهلاً وسهلاً Ahlan wa sahlan! Welcome to the family, and may your path be a smooth one.
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http://blog.britishcouncil.org/2014/10/03/arabic-more-accessible-than-you-think/
Are teachers ready for the coding revolution?
There's a revolution coming to schools across England, one designed to transform a new generation's prospects in the digital age. Come September, a change to the curriculum means the study of computing - and specifically coding - will be mandatory across all state primary and secondary schools.
That also means that something like 16,000 ICT teachers in secondary schools and more than 160,000 primary school teachers face a huge challenge - getting ready to teach the new discipline in time.
Where better to assess their readiness than BETT, the annual education technology fair. I spent yesterday in the vast halls of the Excel exhibition centre talking to teachers, children and even Education Secretary Michael Gove, about what the arrival of coding in the curriculum might mean.
To see two primary school pupils, Ruby and Sienna, working together to make a Raspberry Pi-controlled vehicle move around the floor with a few lines of code, was to understand what's possible. They admitted that coding could be difficult at first - but both were having a lot of fun.
They were benefitting from the work of one of an army of enthusiasts now descending on schools to help prepare for the coding revolution. Tom Stacey, a PhD student, invented the PiBot, the vehicle the girls were controlling. "It's when you combine hardware - something that they can actually touch - with writing lines of code that it actually comes alive," he told me.
Meanwhile, teachers at BETT seemed determined to be upbeat about the arrival of coding. Jonathan Furness, a primary school head teacher, admitted it was "a big ask - we're very much up against it".
With every teacher at primary level having to teach computing, there would need to be resources for staff development, and consultants would be coming into school to help. But he said, "our children are revved up" about coding and the teachers would come with them.
Gary Spracklen, head of digital at an academy in Dorset, said the key was to deal with the fear of learning a whole new language. "Everyone thinks it's a huge step onto a high level - but the message is we need to break it down and start small."
And that was echoed by Carrie-Ann Philbin, a great evangelist for inventive ways of using technology in the classroom, who's just joined Raspberry Pi: "It sounds like a steep learning curve," she admitted when I asked whether older teachers might be intimidated by coding. "But those big words like algorithm and data, when you actually dig deeper you see they're not scary."
So - what of the man who has ordered this revolution in classrooms? Michael Gove told me he accepted that a lot was being asked of teachers. But he insisted, "We're giving teachers all the support they need". He praised "outstanding teachers who understand and get computer science", and said they would be helping colleagues. "And we're making sure we get more talented people from the computing industry who think about teaching and are attracted into the classroom," he said.
And he said there was no alternative to making this work if we didn't want the Googles and Microsofts of tomorrow to be created elsewhere. "Schools will be better places and children will be better prepared for the future if they understand the language of the future - and that is computer programming."
From cabinet ministers pushing a policy and every kind of business promoting their products, to evangelical computing teachers, BETT attracts those with a determinedly optimistic view of the role technology can play in schools.
But in the real world, cynics will point at initiatives from language laboratories to electronic whiteboards to classrooms packed with obsolete desktop computers that have left many teachers underwhelmed. Will the drive to get children coding be different? And will schools be ready? If you're a teacher with a view on your own or your school's readiness for this revolution, please get in touch.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25857276
Teach Scots to kids as standard says leading head
SCOTS should be put at the centre of the Scottish Government’s initiative to promote language learning in the country’s schools, it has been claimed.
Headteacher Isabel Lind said the Scots language was a valuable educational tool and should be included in the 1+2 initiative, which seeks to have children learning two foreign tongues alongside English at primary school.
Ms Lind, who picked up the Ted Wragg Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Pearson Education Awards in London last year for her 44-year career, said Scots was an obvious choice for one of the languages.
“I would like Scots to be one of them,” she said. “If we don’t do something, it will die out. People don’t necessarily know which words are Scots, they are just words we use in everyday speech. There are over a million people speaking Scots according to the census and 58,000 speaking Gaelic.”
“I want my children [pupils] to be bilingual. We need to love language, and I celebrate the words the children bring from home or their grannies.”
Ms Lind’s Aileymill Primary in Greenock focuses heavily on music, poetry, drama and dance, and Scots plays a key role in language learning. But despite her focus on the arts, she criticised Curriculum for Excellence, which was introduced in 2010, for lacking “rigour”.
“What worries me about Curriculum for Excellence is the balance,” she said. “Learning is not always exciting – you need that rigour. I think there’s a danger it’s not there, and that’s my worry. It’s a mistake to throw out the baby with the bathwater and some of the excellent work that went on with the [previous] 5-14 curriculum.”
A report published by the Scottish Government’s Modern Languages Working Group in 2011 called for a “radical change of approach” in language learning. But giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, experts warned the plans to teach two foreign tongues in primary school are unrealistic. They said the lack of suitably qualified teachers would hold up attempts to introduce languages.
There is also a debate about whether schools should stick with languages such as French and German, or put more emphasis on Mandarin and the languages of emerging economies.
The drive to introduce foreign tongues in schools comes despite falling numbers of languages assistants in the classroom.
Both the British Council and consul generals of France, Germany, Italy and Spain have previously warned the Scottish Government about the dwindling numbers of native speakers working in Scotland’s schools.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “The Scottish Government is committed to supporting all of Scotland’s languages. The teaching of Scots can be incorporated into the 1+2 programme. The appointment of Scots language co-ordinators in schools also has the potential to open up different ways of promoting Scots through learning and teaching.”
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Foreign language teaching in British schools is in crisis
Foreign language teaching in British schools is in crisis. The take-up for language courses is declining so precipitately that almost half our university language departments may have to close in a few years. Research by the European Commission last year put young Britons almost at the bottom of the European class in terms of their grasp of a foreign language. Only 9 per cent of our 14 to 15-year-olds were deemed proficient in one foreign subject. The average in the rest of Europe was 42 per cent.
In a global economy, which is increasingly dominated by China rather than Anglophone America, it looks like the wrong way to go, which is why it is encouraging to hear that some schools like Harrogate Grammar are vigorously bucking the trend. In this non-selective academy, all students study a combination of French plus either German, Spanish or Italian. Around 24 languages are studied in total, thanks to a deal with the Rosetta Stone language experts. The school’s aim is to create a different culture from the one prevailing in most schools, one where the question is no longer, “Why study languages?” but “Which ones shall I study?”
It is good to learn that experts see Harrogate Grammar as a model because countering the trend towards knowledge of only one language is a noble ideal, as well as profitable from the point of view of Britons competing in the global jobs market. If all our children learned a foreign language properly it would be almost be a second Enlightenment, because confinement to English alone inevitably limits appreciation of other cultures. Indeed, it is a manifestation of an ugly cultural supremacism.
If we don’t want a situation in which only private school pupils know more than a smattering of French – in which knowledge of another language is another badge of class distinction – we need to look to Harrogate Grammar’s example, as well as revisiting policy changes that made languages optional at GCSE level.
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