Arabic

Aiming to instill a love for the Arabic Language in our students’ hearts; at Land of Learning we offer the Arabic subject as part of our varied education. Our Arabic curriculum has evolved from first-hand experience of learning and teaching Arabic and focuses on four skills: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking.

Learning another language provides many benefitting experiences for the children. These include improving their literacy skills, to developing self-esteem and widening cultural awareness. It develops speaking and listening skills and helps to lay the foundation for future study.

From Foundation Stage 2 to years 2, our students focus on writing and reading Arabic and obtaining relevant vocabulary through a fun and engaging manner. Students in year 3 are introduced to the grammar and additional vocabulary. Students will focus on using the language rather than simply memorisation. Also in all four areas: reading, writing, listening and speaking the students will begin to form simple sentences and phrases.

From years 4 to 6, students will continue to work on grammar and extend their vocabulary giving them the tools to engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, speak in sentences, read and show understanding of words, phrases and simple writing. They will write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly. The students will describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing. They will understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English. (Based on the MFL curriculum).

• F2: Recognising the Arabic letters in both their isolate and joined forms. Recognising them in written and oral form.
• Year 1: Basic reading and writing, simple vocabulary e.g. numbers 1-10, colours, days of the week
• Year 2: Forming simple phrases, greetings and sentences orally and written e.g. asking and answering simple questions
• Year 3: Forming more complex sentences in Arabic. To read, write and understand simple texts incorporating:

• Gender
• Pronouns (Personal & Possessive)
• Adjectives e.g. Describing, people and animals.
• Year 4: Reading and writing more advanced texts incorporating all of the above and conjugation of verbs in the past tenses. E.g. ‘Going to school’, ‘My daily routine’
• Year 5: Texts using conjugation of verbs in all three tenses are studied. Pupils build on their writing to write their own passages to include greater use of connectives and topic variation. E.g. Around town, Going shopping, At home etc.
•  Year 6: Expand on vocabulary and sentence structure for further dialogues, conversations and complex texts e.g. At the restaurant, At the hospital

To support and ensure our students learn and enjoy learning Arabic we use many different resources from dual language stories, Arabic-only stories and picture books, CDs, the internet, educational games and activities. Lessons are planned taking into consideration that each student will be at a different level. We conduct assessments to track that students are making progress.