“Speak Arabic!

For the quickest path to raising the station of the language is not in praising it…

…but in its utilisation.”

Ziyad Ad-Darees

Founder of World Arabic Day

تحدّث العربية

فإنّ أقصرَ طريق لرفع مكانة اللغة العربية ليس في كثرة مديحها

بل في كثرة استخدامها

زياد الدريس

مؤسس إحتفالية اليوم العالمي اللغة العربية

TRANSCRIPT

Studies into how memory operates shine some interesting light on the importance of listening.  Very roughly, if we imagine memory as a flow chart,on one hand we have some form of input, so this is either a visual or audio stimulus or both- (i.e.)  audio-visual stimulus- items (or pieces of this input) are noticed and this is then transferred to the working memory. The working memory retains information for a short period of time before deciding whether or not this is transferred to your long-term memory, which is where it becomes more entrenched and can be recalled.  Your working memory is where things get really interesting. This actually has three components, one of which is the central executive, so this is the boss of the working memory, and this makes the decisions, very roughly about what is then transferred to the long-term memory, other factors aside.

 

In addition we have two storage facilities.  One is the phonological loop and this relates to audio or aural input (so the sounds of words or phrases) and the other is the visuospatial sketchpad,  so what a word looks like the things that is associated with. The idea of effective transfer from working memory to long-term memory relies on a number of things. One is that you need to notice the input and this is when motivation comes into play.  If a resource is of interest to a student they’re much more likely to notice items that are important to them. These are then much more likely to be stored, by a process of following this flow chart, in your long-term memory. If your student is bored out of their brains are unlikely to notice anything which means aren’t likely to retain information.

 

The other interesting thing about this is that it relies on quality input, so the rate of transfer from, or the effectiveness of transfer from your working memory to your long-term memory and retention in your long-term memory of vocabulary items, etc, relies on quality input, both phonologically and visuospatially, and this is where the importance of multimodal input comes into play.  So as we said before, even if you just want to learn Arabic to be able to read and write having phonological input, having aural input as well as written input, seems to help the rate of transfer from your working memory to long-term memory, in other words it makes words easier to remember, it makes language easier to learn and retain if you have multiple sources of input in terms of a particular word and multiple formats of that word that you’re being exposed to.

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Anna Maria and I am an Arabic instructor and DPhil researcher at the University of Oxford.  I currently teach Arabic to graduate and undergraduate students in various different departments and through this research I’ve been focusing on motivating Arabic language learners and engaging them in the learning process in ways that will keep them in the classroom, attract them into the classroom but also to make that whole process of learning what is often presented as a difficult language much more enjoyable and maintainable.

Listening is often an overlooked dimension in language learning and is often seen as a passive process whereby a person sits, lets language wash over them and hopefully something will happen.  In reality it is an active process and a receptive skill that a person needs to develop in order to become an effective listener and an effective language learner and user.

Forty percent of our day-to-day interactions in any language consist of listening.  So by ignoring listening, which is what often happens in many language learning environments, or by not giving listening the importance that it deserves, we actually cut out a huge amount of what actually happens in language use.  

In addition to being overlooked as a skill in language learning, when it is addressed, listening is often seen as very, very difficult, partly because the language learner or user has very little control over the input.  So you can’t if you’re talking to a person, for example, keep pressing pause on that person or keep asking… (I mean you can ask them to repeat, but only so many times). As as a result it’s often something that people will say is the area of most difficulty.  When they’re asked to talk about their language learning experience, they say, for example, that you can talk to me and I might pick out a word or two but I won’t understand what you’re saying. Or that I can write really well or I can read really well but I didn’t understand anything from that two minute audio that I just heard.  

The reason that listening is important, in addition to the fact that it takes up so much of our time in a language, is that there is a high correlation between listening proficiency (so how good you are, how fluent you are and how accurate you are in a language) and your overall proficiency.  There’s a lot of spillover between how well you perform in a listening exercise for example, or in a listening interaction, and how well you can speak the language. In order to speak well you need to listen while and in order to do that you need to build up listening skills.

In addition there’s evidence to suggest that listening skills and listening proficiency assist in reading comprehension and spelling.

Even if your goal  through language learning is just to be able to read and write the language, there are studies that show that exposing yourself to aural input, so listening resources, has a greater impact on your vocabulary acquisition and your comprehension, making it easier to retain words and boosting your overall proficiency even in reading and writing, than just looking at words on a page.  Multimodal input which integrates images, text and audio material is much more effective than unimodal input, which for example, would consist of just words on a page in isolation without any images or accompanying audio.