Since July 9th, we have become close friends with our classmates, language nurturer (teacher), dolls, toys, and a voice recorder. Needless to say, learning language has been a bit different, but as someone trained in education, I value the methodology: it is the Growing Participator Approach and has a high success rate in Arabic fluency with proper pronunciation. Multiple times my friends have been mistaken for native speakers, and they have only been learning for two years, compared to the 10-20 years that many people go through, still unable to engage in daily conversation.
The method starts with a trained native speaker leading a class of 3-5 students through different exercises. At the beginning we were pointing at one or two items after the language nurturer said the word for each object (“Where is the boy?” The participants point to the boy doll. “Where is the girl?” The participants point to the girl doll.). This is in 100% Arabic. In fact, the language nurturer can get in trouble if she speaks English.
Periodically we record our nurturer going through the list of items so that we can study by listening to the words and memorizing their meaning. All of the lists are pictures to keep us from trying to translate into the English equivalent. This is especially important since some Arabic words/phrases have no English equivalent.
After only a few classes we were already into simple sentences (“Put the boy on the table. Put the car in front of the boy.”). Participants act out the sentence with objects on the table and gradually progress into more complex sentences (“The boy runs in front of the car, eating a banana, and the girl watches from the school.”). |
|
|
