Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers
Educational Games in a New Curriculum
Hanan Alshikhabobakr
1
, Pantelis Papadopoulos
2
and Zeinab Ibrahim
1
1
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, AlLuqta St, Doha, Qatar
2
Center for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Keywords: Computer Assisted Language Learning, Educational Games, Collaborative Learning.
Abstract: This paper presents nine educational games and activities for learning the Arabic language. The games are
developed for Arabiyyatii project, a three-year endeavor that involves re-conceptualization of the
curriculum of standard Arabic as a first language in kindergarten. The applications presented in this paper
are developed on tabletop surface computers that support a collaborative and interactive learning
environment. These applications focus on speaking drills, word production, and sentence recognition of
Modern Standard Arabic. This work incorporates an interdisciplinary research framework exploiting best
practices used from related disciplines namely: computer-supported collaborative learning, language
learning, teaching and learning pedagogy, instructional design and scaffolding.
1 INTRODUCTION
This work builds on a previous work to develop a
technology-based curriculum for the teaching of
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to kindergarten
children who are Arabic native speakers. Tabletop
surface computers are used in the curriculum to
facilitate the educational games and activities,
creating a student-centered learning environment.
Technology has been a primary part of the
growing up of the new student generation. The fact
that the students are “Digital Natives” make the
students have a different way of thinking, compared
to their parents’ generation (Prensky, 2005). Hence
to speak the language of the new student generation,
new technologies have to be introduced in some
aspects in the classroom. Many studies, including
Brown’s (1989), had shown that a class utilizing
technology is more motivational than one which
does not use technology.
Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) in education promote student-centered
learning environment, as automatic feedback reduce
teacher supervision and interruption (Wettasinghe
and Hasan, 2007). Moreover, in a classroom that
utilizes ICT in learning, the teacher acts as a coach,
rather than an instructor. Collins et al., (1989)
classify coaching pedagogical practice as
“successful pedagogical model” for its reported
results on improving the learner’s performance in
reading, writing, and mathematics.
Although integrating learning and technology
had been around since the 1960’s (Warschauer and
Healey, 1998), it is still argued whether the teacher
applies the learning pedagogies when using
technology in the classroom (Beetham and Sharpe,
2013). Hence this work aims to apply modern
language learning pedagogy in a technology
enhanced teaching environment.
In this paper, we describe the new technology-
based Arabic curriculum and the basic pedagogical
foundations which lead us to the choice of the
technology. Then, we specify the tabletop version
used and preliminary testing results. Afterwards, we
present and describe the applications developed each
with its learning objective. Lastly we discuss how
each of the applications contribute to fulfil the
learning goals of the new curriculum.
2 THE ARABIC LANGUAGE
Arabic is a diglossic language that belongs to the
Semitic language (Mccarus, 2008) which has a high
and a low form. The high form is used in formal
context which is called Modern Standard Arabic
(MSA), and the low form is the one used in daily life
(Ferguson, 1959; Ferguson, 1991). As many other
Alshikhabobakr, H., Papadopoulos, P. and Ibrahim, Z.
Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers - Educational Games in a New Curriculum.
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2016) - Volume 1, pages 337-344
ISBN: 978-989-758-179-3
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
337
diglossic languages, the high form (MSA in case of
Arabic) is taught in schools whereas the low form is
the mother tongue of the speakers of the language.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, including
three long vowels. The diacritics of the language
include three short vowels as well as other diacritics.
Arabic writing is from right to left where most
letters are connected having different form in
relevance of their position in the word. It is
important to note that writing and pronunciation has
a one-to-one connection in MSA, hence learning
MSA pronunciation is vital to learn the Arabic
language writing.
Although this work focus is Arabic as first
language, the developed applications can be applied
to any first language curriculum for young learners.
Refer to the applications section where the
description of each language acquisitions goal is
reinforced with respective educational application.
3 THE TECHNOLOGY-BASED
ARABIC CURRICULUM
The designed curriculum, which this paper describes
the technology it uses, covers the Arabic language
classes taught in kindergarten (5-6 year old students)
Arabic native speakers. The overall goal of the
course is to teach the students basic linguistic skill in
MSA: vocabulary development, letter recognition
and writing, pronunciation and speaking in MSA.
The first year’s curriculum focuses on letter
recognition and production. However the second
year focuses on the word and sentence level of the
Arabic language. This paper presents the educational
games and activities used in the first and second
years, which are inspired by modern pedagogical
practices. The curriculum involves (Papadopoulos el
al., 2015):
student-centered curriculum based on
storytelling,
physical classroom reconfiguration, and
interactive software centered on multi-player,
collaborative games.
The educational games and activities developed are
based on instructional design that incorporates
cooperative, collaborative learning, and scaffolding.
Cooperative learning activities allow students to
engage in dialogues and learn to listen to each
other’s ideas, and have shown increase in students’
gain of the subject (Gillies, 2014). Collaborative
learning activities increase peer interaction and
could be a powerful tool in improving student
performance on group and individual level
(Sandoval and Millwood, 2005; Teasley et al.,
2008). Scaffolding is achieved when the student is
supported on a gradual level of independency until
they can carry a task on their own, which is the
ultimate goal of teaching (Palincsar and Brown,
1984).
It is also important to note that student-centered
environment is encouraged, where most of the
educational applications we present use automatic
instant feedback, which is preferred to human
feedback and it encourages self-learning (Malmi and
Korhonen, 2004).
The competitive nature of some of the
applications is a motivational incentive for the
students as it is expected to increase interaction and
engagement (Papadopoulos et al., 2014).
The technology used in this research is chosen to
comprehend all the above criteria (is a platform
multi-user, interactive, friendly to the user – the
kindergartners). In the following section the
designated technology is presented.
3.1 Technology Choice: Tabletops in
Language Learning
The technology used in this work is the Samsung
SUR40 tabletop surface computers with Microsoft
PixcelSense (table for the rest of the paper). The
table recognizes more than 50 simultaneous touch
points, allowing many students to participate in a
given activity. Also, the given size of the active
display area is 0.8 x 0.4 meters, where the display
can be divided into different parts allowing different
group sizes to participate depending on the nature of
the activity.
The technology choice based on the literature
showing promising results in using touch
multimodal technologies in learning (Kerne et al.,
2006) as they support creative processes and they
enhances idea formation. More specifically, multi-
touch technologies (a.k.a. touch device that allows
multiple users) have many advantages over other
single user, as they can support cooperative learning
(Piper, 2008).
3.2 Preliminary Testing
In the early stages of this work we focused on
testing the tabletop user experience for children.
This happened in three stages: first we tested the
tabletops with a small group of children
(Papadopoulos et al., 2013): 4 and 9 year old boys
and 5 and 7 year old girls. This was to evaluate the
CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
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interaction among the children and between the
children and the tabletop. The observations yielded
that learning curve is very steep and the children
were highly enthusiastic.
The second test was carried out by observing a 6
year old boy using the technology (Papadopoulos et
al., 2013). The goal of this evaluation was to check
if the system is suitable for the targeted age. The
height of the screen was suitable that the boy could
interact with the table but not the whole screen,
something that would be useful in designing
collaborative activities in which students control
different areas in the interface.
The third stage involved a richer experiment
carried over 9 weeks to a kindergarten class of 17
students at a local school (Papadopoulos et al.,
2014). That was while introducing the new
technology-based curriculum. The experiment went
smooth; students were swiftly familiarized with the
educational games.
4 THE APPLICATIONS
In this section, we present nine educational
applications to train and test the Arabic language
acquisition. An application represents either an
educational activity or a game. An educational
activity helps the student to exercise a certain
language skill, hence it allows an unrestricted time
and is trial-and-error based. An educational game on
the other hand focuses on the fun factor, hence it
presents timed questions and can be based on
competition among the students.
There are three main categories of the
applications we present in this paper: Educational
Activities, Educational Games, and applications that
are both Educational Activities and Educational
Games. The Educational Activities category
involves four applications: “Construct your Story”,
“Order the Alphabet”, “Writing Letters v.2” and
“Writing Words”. The Educational Games category
involves two applications: “Pairing: Intermediate”
and “Pairing: Advanced”. The Educational Games
and Activities category involves three applications:
“Describe the Image”, “Fill in the blank” and “Word
Ordering”.
4.1 Educational Activities
4.1.1 “Construct Your Story”: Speaking
Drills
This is a collaborative activity that fosters children’s
speaking and listening skills. It is based on the
listening activity “Aladdin and the Magical Lamp”,
a folklore story adapted to fit the students culture
and language proficiency. A series of 26 episodes
were created, with each episode having an audio
track with a static image sequence. In “Construct
your Story”, groups of students work collaboratively
to place the scenes of an episode they watched in
any order they choose. Then they retell the new
story based on their imagination.
yThis exercise encourages students to listen to
each other’s version of the story which develops
their critical thinking and listening skills (Pech,
1989). It also helps to cultivate their cognitive skills
by means of their communicating orally (Van
Groenou, 1995). A recent study has shown that
storytelling promotes the development of the four
language skills; reading, writing, speaking, and
listening (Atta-Alla, 2012).
While the previous activity improves speaking
and listening skills, the following application helps
young learners revise the Arabic alphabet.
Figure 1: “Construct your Story” application.
4.1.2 “Order the Alphabet”: Alphabet Drills
This is a collaborative activity that helps students
review the Arabic alphabet. In the curriculum
developed by us, each class is dedicated to teaching
one letter and only after covering all letters of the
alphabet is this application made accessible. At the
start of this activity, all the letters are scattered on
the screen in the form of an earthworm. Each group
collaborates to arrange the letters in the correct
order. Once they are arranged, only misplaced letters
are scattered to give the students another chance to
arrange them correctly. See Figure 2.
While the previous activity focus on the letter
level, in the rest of the paper, we present
applications that focus on the word and sentence
level.
Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers - Educational Games in a New Curriculum
339
Figure 2: “Order the Alphabet” application.
4.1.3 “Writing Letters V.2”: Writing
This is an individual educational activity that aims to
help students practice writing the letters of the
Arabic alphabet. In a previous paper (Papadopoulos
et al., 2014), the “Writing” educational activity was
introduced and we enhanced in this paper based on
student feedback. The screen of the table is divided
into four parts allowing four students at a time to
have their own individual workspace. Each student
is presented with a keyboard of the Arabic alphabet
including vowels. Upon choosing a letter, a writing
pad appears with the letter on it and arrows showing
the right way of writing, the letter without arrows,
several outlines of the letter, and empty lines for
writing without scaffolding. Moreover, writing tools
are provided to allow the student to undo, change
color, and erase their input. In addition they have the
option to use either two or three lines for writing.
The two lines pad has bigger fonts that are easier to
copy, while the three lines pad has smaller fonts but
more space to write copies of the letter (Figure 3).
Figure 3: “Writing application v.1”. 1: Letter bar; 2:
Writing pad; 3: Write/erase mode; 4: Undo; 5: Color
wheel; 6: Three lines; 7: Two lines.
The modification we made to the second version
of this activity is that instead of using static arrows
around the letters, we added a video component in
which a pen traces the first few occurrences of the
letter (Figure 4). This is a clearer demonstration and
an easier way for the young learners to learn the
correct way to write.
4.1.4 “Writing Words”: Writing
Similar to “Writing Letters”, this is an individual
educational activity that aims to help students
practice writing. “Writing Words” is developed to
help students practice writing the letter in the
connected form and consequently writing complete
words. Upon choosing a letter, a writing pad appears
with words including the chosen letter and letters
learnt in previous classes. Moreover, this application
displays a pen tracing the displayed words, to show
the student the right sequence of writing each word.
Moreover, an occurrence of each word is presented
in dotted lines, followed by an empty line (Figure 5).
The gradual level of transferring control to the
student gives them more confidence in completing
the task independently.
Figure 4: “Writing letters application v.2”.
Figure 5: “Writing Words” application.
While the previous application focuses on word
production, the next application is the educational
game “Pairing”, which focuses on word recognition.
4.2 Educational Games
The “Pairing” game has three different difficulty
CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
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levels: basic, intermediate and advanced. The first
level, “Pairing Basic”, is presented in a previous
paper (Authors, 2015) and it focuses on practicing
word pronunciation where the task is to match two
images that start with the same letter in MSA
(Figure 6). In the next section, we explain the second
and third levels of “Pairing”.
Figure 6: “Pairing Basic” application.
4.2.1 “Pairing Intermediate”: Letter
Recognition
This is a competition-based educational game that
develops the reading skills of the students. The
design of this game allows four students to compete
against each other while collecting points. The
screen is divided into four sections, one per student.
In each of the individual displays, a set of images
and words appear in a random order, and the
challenge is to match an image with the correct
word. Each word starts with a different letter. Hence
if the student can recognize the first letter of the
word, he/she can guess the matching image (Figure
7). This game utilizes trial-and-error learning where
the student gets immediate feedback on the correct
or wrong answer.
Figure 7: “Pairing Intermediate”. The window shown per
student, correct vs. wrong matches and the current score.
4.2.2 “Pairing Advanced”: Word
Recognition
The “Pairing Advanced” game is the more difficult
version of “Pairing Intermediate” where all the
words presented start with the same letter, pushing
the student to read the whole word before they could
match it with the correct image. The same pedagogy
of “Pairing Intermediate” is applied here, where
students try to answer correctly to overtake their
peers, questions are generated randomly until the
target number of points is reached. The winner is the
player who reaches the target points first.
While the previous “Pairing” games aim to
develop the students’ reading of MSA at the word
level, the following games and activities develop
and test the students’ reading ability at the sentence
level.
4.3 Educational Games and Activities
The following applications, designed for students
with good word level comprehension, come in two
forms: Activity based and Game based. We present
the applications according to their difficulty. The
first application is “Describe the Image” where the
student picks the best descriptive sentence to
describe a picture. The second application is “Fill in
the blank” where the student chooses a word that fits
in the sentence. This activity requires a deeper level
of understanding to determine the gender, the
number, and other features of the word. The third
application is “Word ordering” where the student
needs to know sentence structures to be able to solve
the challenges, making this application more
difficult than “Describe the Image” and “Fill in the
Blank”.
Although these activities are typical language
learning activities that can also be performed on pen
and paper, it is very important to note the advantages
of carrying them out in a group and in a responsive
technology-enabled environment:
1) Affective Role of Feedback: The student is
encouraged to be more independent in the
learning process. Malmi and Korhonen’s (2004,
p. 1) analysis work on feedback shows the
following agreeing result:
“Learning tools that automatically assess and
give feedback on learners’ performance
provide valuable help for both teachers and
learners. From teacher’s point of view, the
main motivation is to save time and increase
the amount of feedback on large courses. For
learners, automatic feedback is very useful,
because it supports self study and distance
learning. It is often much better to get
instantly even simple feedback than to get
advanced human feedback many days
Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers - Educational Games in a New Curriculum
341
afterwards, or even worse to get no feedback
at all.”
The applications in the coming section follow the
above recommendation, where just the basic
feedback is given to the students as hints, indicating
whether their answer was right or wrong.
2) Collaboration between Team Members: A
version of the application is designed to allow
team formation and collaboration. Instead of
solving the questions individually, a group of
students team up to solve the questions correctly.
Collaboration in learning is a social interaction
that has been proven to develop individual
cognitive skills (Chapelle 2001). Also it
improves the student’s performance on group
and individual levels (Sandoval and Millwood
2005; Teasley 2008).
3) Creating the Same Application for Different
Purposes: We created two versions of the
applications: an activity and a game version. The
activity version is designed to allow the students
to practice reading as they have no time limit to
solve an exercise and repetitions are allowed.
The game version on the other hand aims at
testing the reading skills of the students against
time and mistakes constraints.
Due to the research time constraints, game version is
created only for two of the applications: “Describe
the Image” and “Fill in the Blank”
4.3.1 “Describe the Image”: Sentence Level
This application can be individual or competition
based for reading drills. In the activity version, the
application starts with prompting the teacher to
select a theme (food, birds, toys, etc.), see Figure 8.
Corresponding to the theme selected, each of four
students is presented with an image with multiple
descriptions, where the challenge is to find the best
description. This activity gives feedback while
giving the student an opportunity to try one or more
answers (Figure 9).
In the game version of the application, two teams
of students compete to get maximum amount of
jewels in their necklace (Figure 10). Each team is
rewarded with jewels for a correct answer they made
(Figures 11). Similar to the previous application, the
following application tests the students’ reading and
comprehension skills at the sentence level.
Figure 8: “Describe the Image application” start page
displaying themes of; food, birds, predators, toys, pets,
transportation, insects, daily activities, and hobbies.
Figure 9: “Describe the Image Activity” question from
“Toys” theme, displaying feedback on the answers.
Figure 10: “Describe the Image Game” two teams’ setup. A correct answer is rewarded by jewels to the necklace.
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Figure 11:“Describe the Image” reward for zero, one, two,
and three points, shown by the image respectively.
4.3.2 “Fill in the Blank”: Sentence Level
Similar to the “Describe the Image” application, this
activity can be individual or competition based for
reading drills. In the activity version an incomplete
sentence with a blank to indicate a missing word is
presented along with multiple word choices. The
student is challenged to pick the most suitable word
for the blank. If a wrong choice is made, the
application gives the option to restart the question,
shuffle the choices and the player can try again, see
Figure 12.
In the game version two teams of students
compete. The setup is similar to “Describe the
Image” two player game; refer to Figure 10 and 11.
Figure 12: “Fill in the Blank” question example from
“Toys” theme, displaying feedback on the answers.
4.3.3 “Word Ordering”: Sentence Level
This application helps the student practice sentence
construction. At the start of the application, the
teacher selects a theme as in Figure 8. According to
the selected theme, a set of words (two to five) are
scattered on the screen, and the students are
challenged to rearrange them into a meaningful
sentence. When they arrange them in the wrong
order, a second attempt is allowed until the right
order is achieved (Figure 13). This activity is
commonly used in language learning; see for
example Mangoville English language learning
program for kids (Sørensen and Meyer, 2007).
Figure 13: “Word ordering” Activity.
5 CONCLUSION
The paper presented nine of the educational games
developed in the context of the Arabiyyatii project.
Previous applications in the project have already
been used in classrooms and have been proven
beneficial for the students at the letter level. The
current work builds on what had been tested,
extending students’ experience to the word and
sentence level. The impact of the new applications is
still to be evaluated in classrooms and this could be
the goal of future research activities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been funded by a grant from QNRF
(Qatar National Research Fund), NPRP Project 4-
1074-5-164 entitled “Advancing Arabic Language
Learning in Qatar”.
The authors would like to thank Jamila Al-
Shamari for her contributions in the applications’
content. We would also like to thank Alina Alina Al-
Aswadi for her sharing her feedback on this paper.
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