Workshop on Teaching Language to the Novice Level

Place: EDEP 

Attendees: EDEP Staff 

Presenter biography: Dr. Khaled Abu Amsha earned his BA degree in Arabic Literature, an MA degree with distinction in teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, and a PhD in curriculum development and methods of teaching Arabic as a second language, and his second PhD is in linguistics with distinction. 

Workshop themes: 

The workshop focused on teaching the alphabet book, authored by Dr. Abu Amsha, to foreign novice learners and demonstrated its importance in establishing the correct writing and reading logic of the student.

Dr. Abu Amsha explained the approach of the book in using words related to the letters that the student already learned and avoiding the use of words consisting of letters not studied before. He also emphasized the importance of correct writing at this level as the correct writing of the letter at this level is the basis of the language learning process. 

In this workshop, the lecturer pointed out that understanding the meaning of the word at this level is not influential as the focus is to enable the student to connect letters together to write a correct word, identify the letter in different shapes and read it, differentiate between long vowels and short vowels in listening and speaking. 

In the end, Dr. Abu Amsha mentioned the importance of the first session for foreign learners and that they should know that at the end of the session, they will be able to produce complete and correct sentences.