msa-ca

12 | From MSA to CA: A Beginner’s guide for transitioning into Colloquial Arabic CA, and utilize their previous knowledge in MSA to learn CA. The content and structure are based on my teaching experience and as an ACTFL OPI interviewer to assist students in their quest to speak CA with native speakers with relative ease. In this book, you will notice several features, one of which is adding a practice dialogue at the end of each chapter to encourage speaking. From my interactions with beginning students, I noticed that they like to practice speaking with Arabic native speakers but are shy or not confident enough or do not know how to reach them. The practice dialogue section is a venue for gaining confidence, where the speaker in the recording pauses during the dialogue, leaving lines for the student to complete orally and in writing. This allows the student to have a real conversation during the recorded dialogue. In addition, you will find voweling on some of the words when first introduced to help in correctly reading them. From the second time onwards, the voweling disappears. Thus, students receive help the first time when they read the full voweling of the word, then encouragement to remember the correct pronunciation by more practice, while having a reference. Voweling is somewhat rare in CA books because this is how Arabic native speakers read. However, I noticed that students have struggled with reading and practicing many words even after listening to them in the audio recording. This is partially because many MSA books are heavily voweled. For some students studying MSA, switching to CA where the books have no vowels is unsettling. Thus, I have attempted to reach a middle ground between both approaches in this book where voweling is used only when a new word is introduced then disappears after its introduction. Transliteration is not employed because the target students of this book have had one year of Arabic or more and can read Arabic script.