Cultural Books Simplifying

Curricula design and Cultural Books Simplifying:

Midad’s staff has designed two Arabic education series which are Madinat Al-Arabiya (The City of Arabic) for kids and Al-Arabiya lil Hayat wal Turath (Arabic for Life and Culture) for adults in cooperation with Ibn Haldun university and Al-Madina Institute. Moreover, the team has authored many books to support Arabic learners and has simplified several cultural Arabic books and rewrote them in modern standard Arabic and this includes: 

• The Common Collocations Book: it explains the collocations and their use in Arabic and mentions the most common ones presented to students based on their levels. 

What are the collocations?

A collocation is a group of two or more words that are almost always put together to create a specific meaning; for example, break a record or deliver a speech. 

In this book, collocations were divided into three levels: intermediate, advanced, and proficient, regardless of beginners as students at this level learn alphabets and essential words to create simple sentences. In general, collocations add beauty to the sentence which is hard for a beginner student to understand. 

• Kalila wa Dimna, written by Ibn Al-Muqaffa, is one of the most famous cultural books whose tales carry wisdom and knowledge. Our approach to simplify this book was: 
  • To simplify the tales and not rephrase them; thus, if the students return to the original book, they find a common language used that qualifies them to read cultural books and understand them. The selection of stories was according to the following criteria: 
    • The clarity of the idea in a story
    • Story’s usefulness in terms of language and idea. 
    • The less amount of imagination in a story
  • To classify stories based on levels starting from intermediate low, intermediate high, and advanced low. 
• Simplified Majma’al-Amthal (A Collection of Parables): it is a compilation of Arabic proverbs with explanations and anecdotes of which we selected and presented in the simplified version of the book according to the following approach: 
  • Choose clear-cut stories and proverbs. 
  • Rephrase the texts- unlike Kalila Wa Dimna where some of the original texts were kept. 
  • Some stories remain the same, especially the aHadith where modification would be something unlawful. 
  • Stories were divided into major levels- intermediate low to advanced low and classified as easy, medium, or hard in the same level as well.