Designing an Arabic Speaking and Listening Skills E- Course: Resources, Activities and Students' Perceptions

Abstract

This paper presents a fully online course model for teaching speaking and listening skills for students learning Arabic as a foreign language at the International Peace College South Africa on the NEO learning management platform. It also investigates the students' attitudes towards the course. The course was developed by the researcher during the first semester of 2020. This period coincided with South Africa’s first wave of COVID-19, and the country’s first strict lockdown. The syllabus consists of three components: listening, speaking and conversational Arabic. It includes various technology-enhanced activities and resources which were developed by using LMS features, Web 2.0 tools, and e-learning specifications such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) and Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). The integration of technology in the course is based on an approach that combines Bloom's taxonomy and Technology Integration Matrix (TIM). Apart from the description of the course, this study used a thirty-item questionnaire to investigate the attitudes of thirty-one learners who participated in the course. They answered questions about the course’s resources, activities as well as its impact on their language skills. Results from the questionnaire revealed that the respondents' attitudes towards the online course were positive and statistically significant at p < .05. The design and the approach adopted in this study can apply to any context of language teaching. It provides a myriad of technology-enhanced activities that can be effectively used to teach listening and speaking skills virtually. Foreign language teachers can adopt this approach in its entirety, or with idiosyncratic modifications to design their language courses, irrespective of the virtual learning ecology (VLE) they use.

Utilization of Virtual Learning Environment in Malaysian Non-Arabic Speaking Learners’ Classroom

“…VLE has greatly benefited language learning and can help learners improve their language skills (Adas & Bakir, 2013;Ghazizadeh & Fatemipour, 2017;Ghani et al, 2016;Jalaluddin, 2016;Mohd, 2019;Hamouda, 2020;Mohammed, 2022). Due to its advantage in terms of distance, time, and resources, VLE remains one of the most powerful tools that have been at the forefront of altering educational methods for a long time (Nwagwu, 2020).…”

“…Previous studies discovered a beneficial connection between learning Arabic in a virtual setting and expanding one's linguistic vocabulary. When VLLE is used, language learners' speaking, listening, reading, and writing abilities can be strengthened (Mohammed, 2022).…”

Enhancing Instrumental Competence in Translator Training in a Higher Education Context: A Task-Based Approach

“…Similarly, in Herget's 2020 study, project-based training was adopted to train student translators to use a cloudbased CAT software called Memsource (Herget, 2020). More recently, the same approach was used to explore the translation processes such as pauses, focus, revision, and etcetera (Mohammed, 2022).…”

“…To adapt to the reality and stay abreast to the demands of the post-COVID-19 market, instructional designers are more than ever required to adopt innovative strategies in the design of curricula, assessment methods, and the delivery of content. Translator training institutions are no exception (Mohammed, 2022). Translator education should ideally focus on the academic qualifications and employability of student translators by focusing on the demands of the translation industry.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Technology-Based Foreign Language Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Direction for Indonesia Language Learning

“…Hereinafter, there were several keywords interpreting foreign language studied in the documents related to technology-based foreign language learning during the COVID-19 pandemic such as "English for academic purpose", "English language", "EFL", and "English as a foreign language". It shows that English was the most familiar language studied as a research topic in the COVID-19 outbreak in which some researchers focused their topic on the English language [18], [47], [64], [65], although some other foreign languages were also studied as a research topic such as Chinese [14], Japanese [11], Russian [9], and Arabic [12]. In addition, there were some keywords interpreting measured skills or abilities in the foreign language learning such as "communication skills" and "digital literacy".…”