Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers

Educational Games in a New Curriculum

Hanan Alshikhabobakr

, Pantelis Papadopoulos

and Zeinab Ibrahim

Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, AlLuqta St, Doha, Qatar

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

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

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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

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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

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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

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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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