Reviewed by Maher Awad, Rice University

The Al-Kitaab textbook series, which focuses on Modern Standard Arabic but also integrates Egyptian colloquial Arabic, is a comprehensive communicatively based textbook program designed to teach Arabic from the beginning level to American college students. The first edition of Alif Baa and Al-Kitaab, Part 1 were published in 1995. This second edition is substantially revised and updated. This series also includes Al-Kitaab, Part 2 (1997), designed for the intermediate-level learner, and Al-Kitaab, Part 3 (2001), designed for the advanced-level learner.

Alif Baa, which is accompanied by two DVDs bound into the book, is the basic foundation of the Al-Kitaab series. Its target audience is the novice learner of Arabic. It consists of ten lessons, an English-Arabic glossary, and an appendix with the texts of the twelve dialogic scenes on the accompanying DVDs. Alif Baa systematically covers all of the sounds and letters of the Arabic alphabet, as well as the numbers 1–10. It also introduces about 150 basic vocabulary words and expressions in the context of appropriate and relevant written exercises in the book and sound files and spoken dialogues on the DVDs. The typical lesson covers about half a dozen letters and diacritical symbols. Each lesson has recognition-focused exercises and production-focused drills, along with the basic vocabulary introduced in throughout the lesson. Each lesson also includes a brief section about some salient cultural feature, for example, making and drinking coffee, what to say to someone who is not feeling well, and how to respond when a host offers you food or drink.

The DVDs consist of ten lessons that parallel the lessons in the book and include four main components in each lesson: (i) listening and vocabulary-building exercises, all at the level of individual words, (ii) various signs written in Arabic, such as street signs, shop signs, still advertisements, and so on, (iii) viewing an Arabic calligrapher writing all the different letters and symbols of the Arabic alphabet, and (iv) short dialogues, carried out in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and covering such topics as self- introductions, greetings, taking leave, and talking on the phone. These dialogues address oral-aural skills and serve as rich cultural lessons. The DVDs make for a multimedia program that is at once attractive and compelling, but they do not come without some technical glitches (on which see below)

Al-Kitaab, Part 1 assumes that the student has gone through Alif Baa. It consists of twenty lessons, three DVDs, an Arabic-English glossary, an English-Arabic glossary, grammar (mainly verb-conjugation) charts, and a very useful index (new to this edition) listing all of the grammar topics covered in the book along with their page location. The goal of the book and DVDs is to take the beginning learner, who has already mastered the sounds and letters of Arabic, from the beginning level to the intermediate level.

The overall organizing theme of Al-Kitaab, Part 1 is a narrative story of two main characters: Khalid, a college student in Egypt, and his cousin Maha, a college student in the United States, their extended families, and their friends. This organizing theme gives context and motivation for many (but not all) of the vocabulary and grammatical structures focused on in the lessons.

Each of the twenty lessons in Al-Kitaab, Part 1 begins with some one to two dozen vocabulary words critical for understanding the lesson’s story line. This is followed by three or four vocabulary-based exercises, one of which is usually an interactive oral exercise best done as a class group activity. A viewing follows of the video scene on the DVD about Khalid or Maha, family members or friends speaking in standard Arabic about themselves. Each successive lesson and scene develops the story line further. There are usually a few listening-comprehension exercises here, and—in keeping with the authors’ desired balance in covering the four skills, culture, and grammar—activities addressing those skills, all based on carefully chosen authentic level-appropriate texts. Grammar explanations are brief, concise, and not too technical, covering topics that emerge from the narrative or the activities and exercises in the lessons. These exercises are usually well contextualized, but some are decontextualized, mechanical drills, especially where certain controlled structures are being highlighted. The penultimate section of every lesson usually contains a few video scenes: an Egyptian colloquial Arabic rendition mirroring an earlier scene and some discussion also in Egyptian colloquial Arabic about some interesting cultural aspect not necessarily directly related to the story line. Finally, there is a list, different from the one appearing at the beginning of the lesson, of important and useful vocabulary that arose in the lesson’s exercises and activities.

This series has become among the most widely used Arabic language programs in the United States for several reasons. First, it follows the principles of meaning-focused, communicative approaches to language teaching, with an emphasis on real, natural, creative, and interactive communication. These approaches aim to enable the learner to attain real proficiency so as to function in a native-speaking environment. A corollary of such approaches is that language must be taught in context, and this tenet is realized throughout, in the well-contextualized exercises and activities. Second, it addresses the four language skills while adding cultural information, resulting in a comprehensive pedagogical program. And, it uses authentic listening and reading materials that make the language come alive, with excellent listening and reading exercises based on these authentic materials.

One key feature of this book, which surely has greatly contributed to its success, is that it does not shrink from the challenging task of teaching standard Arabic alongside a colloquial dialect. The series views the standard and the colloquial as two registers of the same language that exist side by side in harmony, not as two competing languages with a chasm separating them. On objective grounds, and on grounds that take the Arabic linguistic reality of diglossia into account, true proficiency in Arabic cannot be attained by learning only standard Arabic. To be truly proficient in Arabic, one must also attain functional proficiency in the more natural, less formal colloquial spoken Arabic (of any variety), the kind that native Arabic speakers use in natural, real-time conversations. This approach taken here is a welcome and refreshing departure from traditional, prescriptivist approaches to the teaching of Arabic that placed most of the emphasis on reading, less on writing, and much less on speaking and listening. This traditional approach dictated that standard Arabic alone would be chosen for this or that Arabic language program, and in doing so shunned colloquial Arabic.

This program is now the choice of many of teachers and learners partly because the DVDs make the language come alive. They contain the sights and sounds of the Arabic language and culture and make the learning process more fun. The on-demand interactive audio-visual component is indispensable to this program and contributes to its success. But with technology comes challenges. Some technical issues with the DVDs need be corrected in the next release, especially having to do with the way the cursor deals with lists. .Another issue with the DVDs is that the recording of many words is inadvertently chopped off at the beginning, by a few milliseconds, a nontrivial problem when a word consists of only a few phonemes. Another issue with the DVDs is that parts of words on the edge of the screen lie outside the viewable area.

In addition to these technical problems, there are a few imperfections in this textbook series. Alif Baa, which is an otherwise superb coverage of all the sounds and letters of Arabic, would have been an excellent place to include a section on word-stress placement. I hope the next printing of this book will correct this omission, as well as the inevitable, though not too numerous, typos.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, these two books and their accompanying DVDs constitute one of the most complete modern Arabic pedagogy programs available, and they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Every Arabic language program in the United States that follows the now-mainstream principles of proficiency language teaching ought to seriously and open-mindedly consider this program.