Material Detail

This is an open textbook on Beginner Arabic for undergraduate students who are taking Arabic in their first semester. It addresses letters and sounds of Arabic along with basic skills in reading, speaking and writing. The book can be used as a self-study resource or as the main textbook in beginning Arabic classes.

In our experience teaching Arabic at Michigan State University, we have always tailored our curricula to students’ needs and the intended learning outcomes set up by ACTFL guidelines. In our continual efforts to provide students with an optimal and up-to-date learning experience, we supplemented textbook material with additional handouts and worksheets that targeted different bands of proficiency. Over the years, it became evident that even with the greatest textbooks, things get obsolete or outdated in a world that is ever-changing. We also encountered considerable shortcomings in the available textbooks, particularly the lack of task-based learning opportunities and the absence of engaging activities and sufficient culture representations. As we filled in these gaps, we ended up with a wealth of resources and worksheets that kept growing over the years. It became a pressing idea that the required textbooks have become more of a financial burden to our students and it cannot be a good investment to keep them.

This book is the entry-level Arabic. It can cater to online-only classes as well as hybrid sections. This feeds into the flipped-class approach in which students prepare and study the material at home then meet in class to practice and engage in conversations based on the material they have already completed online. This course builds literacy in Arabic along with working on fluency and vocabulary use in theme-based components.

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