茄子直播

Learning a new language allows students to discover a new way of thinking about the world, says Abdel-Khalig Ali (photo courtesy Faculty of Arts & Science)

Award-winning teacher Abdel-Khalig Ali

Abdel-Khalig Ali, of the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations, is one of five members of the Faculty of Arts & Science to receive an Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012. The awards, established in 1993, are based on nominations by peers and students.

Ali, who joined the Faculty in 2005, was recognized for transforming the Arabic language program and sparking a dramatic increase in enrolment. Highly rated by his students, Ali has incorporated e-learning aids and resources and created a modern Arabic workbook for students that he is currently developing into a textbook 鈥 one that promises to become the standard in the field.

I love teaching. Without fail, every year there is at least one student who makes me think twice about what I think I know and inspires me to improve how I teach. I鈥檓 looking to get an idea across in the best way I can, and the way I can assess my success or failure is by looking at the cases where I didn鈥檛 get it across, where I thought, 鈥淎h, I never thought you鈥檇 understand it that way.鈥 And that鈥檚 what I work on next. It鈥檚 a cumulative thing.

Poetry is one of the best ways to appreciate a language. Even with some languages that I鈥檝e studied just briefly, what I remember is the poetry because it establishes a connection with the language at a level that鈥檚 closer than reading a text or a novel. Naming my favourite work by an Arabic writer would be very difficult! But in English translation, Khalil Gibran鈥檚 The Prophet is very accessible and, I think, one of the best books of all time.

Right from the beginning, I tell students: don鈥檛 expect the Arabic language to behave in a certain way. Don鈥檛 expect the plural to be a suffix. Don鈥檛 expect the sentence to go in a certain way. Try to figure out what it is that the language does. For example, the way words are structured in Arabic is a source of difficulty for English speakers. At some point in the course I鈥檒l say, what do you notice about the words maktaba (library), kitaab (book), kutub (books) and kaatib (writer)? They all have these sounds: k-t-b. And then I explain, we give them different shapes with different vowels around them rather than suffixes or prefixes, and that鈥檚 how Arabic works. That root k-t-b is unpronounceable, though it has a meaning鈥 all the 鈥ktb鈥 words have to do with writing.

When you are learning a language, you鈥檙e learning a way of thinking. In English, we say 鈥淚 have a book;鈥 in Arabic, we say 鈥渁 book is at me.鈥 It鈥檚 not the same relationship between the book and myself. I don鈥檛 want to read too much into it, but it鈥檚 not just different ways that people express themselves; it鈥檚 a different way of thinking about the world.

茄子直播鈥檚 department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations used to teach only Classical Arabic. But now we offer varieties of the language, which gives students access to all of the Arabic-speaking world. Three levels of Arabic coexist: Classical, Modern Standard and regional varieties. The domain of Classical Arabic is religious texts, Muslim and Christian 鈥 no one speaks it as a mother tongue. Modern Standard Arabic is the standardized variety that鈥檚 taught at school. It鈥檚 the language used in newspapers, on the radio 鈥 in formal situations 鈥 and is what I was hired to teach. And the language that you learn as a child and use in everyday life is one of the dozens of spoken varieties 鈥 such as my own native language, Sudanese Arabic. Each of these shows influence from other languages that were spoken in those areas before Arabic arrived, such as Nubian in northern Sudan. This makes them very different. If you take someone from Morocco and someone from the Gulf, they will have to resort to Modern Standard to communicate.

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