Reading is a skill that people seem to either love or hate. At once it serves as a fundamental feature of daily life, a means of learning and a hobby. A high premium is put on those with the ability to speed-read, quickly assimilating information and reproducing it in working contexts. From school, there is a sense that a pupil has an advantage if they are able to remember facts straight from a textbook without needing to make notes of their own or be lectured by a teacher. When learning a language, however, reading is an often overlooked part of the journey towards fluency. With the introduction of phonics in English classrooms there is still no clear understanding as to how best to teach the complex and often nonsensical rules of pronunciation in our own language, let alone in a different tongue. Besides, other than in an exam situation, reading comprehension is rarely tested in a foreign context – particularly not when compared to speaking or listening.
With that in mind, reading is often considered less important unless a student is learning for a formal purpose. This is a great oversight though as it offers the best opportunity for a student to practice their independent learning, it contributes significantly to the building of a bespoke vocabulary tailored to a particular learner’s needs, and it can bring enjoyment to learning a language – taking an individual out of the rigours of practice and study and instead enabling a more visceral connection to be built to the new language through story and narrative. So, whilst reading may be one of the skills furthest removed from spoken fluency, it should remain an integral part of any learner’s curriculum. For an English speaker learning Arabic, this is especially significant due to the challenge posed by working in an unfamiliar alphabet.
Building Skill
Students must begin by learning the 28 Arabic letters and the sounds they produce, taking care to note the different forms letters can take if positioned at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. Alongside these should be studied the vowel markings positioned above or below the letters that provide indications of how they are to be pronounced. Speaking the words out loud, as we first learned to do in our own language when learning to read, is crucial as it helps one get the feel of the spoken form of the language, and ensure that the similar letters are being pronounced correctly. As with phonics taught here in the UK, it can be useful to string together a random series of letters not worrying about the word that is produced just to practice the identification of different letters and sounds. A mistake often made is to rely too heavily on transliteration when learning initial vocabulary. Instead the student should make an effort to write in the Arabic alphabet too, encouraging a familiarity with reading and writing from the start.
Once an initial level of competence is built, reading comprehension is a helpful way to improve reading fluency and test your ability to understand what it is you’re reading. It increases your comfortability with longer sentences and full paragraphs whilst reiterating the point that even if you can’t read every word in a sentence you can often make an educated guess at the meaning of the text – useful when travelling abroad!
Additionally, these sample texts are often packed with useful idioms and colloquial phrase that can be introduced into your own writing and speech. In this way a clearer connection is also built between reading and speaking. Once that link is recognised a student should feel confident to start selecting their own pieces to read – being patient and gradually working up to articles or even chapters in books. A careful selection of source texts can help you develop a bespoke vocabulary tailored to your interests and preparing you effectively to communicate around those subjects in any context.
Poetry
One of the surest ways to develop a love for reading in Arabic is to engage with Arabic poetry, sampling pieces from across the region and throughout history – a tour through time and space. This will improve your vocabulary but also forge a deep feeling for the language and the way it can be employed to the greatest of effects. Poetry brings together expressive writing, a test of your ability to read, and when done correctly the aural pleasure of hearing the words of al-Mutannabi or Nizar Qabani echo from the point they were written to the point you are speaking them. There are no rules on how poetry should be read, but for an eager student reading through internally to register the vocabulary being used and the gist of the poem can then be combined with a secondary reading out loud instead tuned to follow the rhythms of the writing – reading for meaning, but also for feeling.
There are many variations of Arabic poetry but the only guide to what you choose should be your own interest. Some may choose to read modern protest poetry, hearing the voice of oppressed groups and filling their own vocabulary with the words of the activists. Others might choose a regional dialect to focus on and see the geography of a country through the expression of its poets. There are Hija, satirical poems, Wasf, descriptive poems, Ritha, elegiac poems, and Ghazal, love poems. In each can be found something to remember, a turn of phrase, a combination of sounds or beats that might inspire your own expression. Read together these poems will demonstrate the diversity of the written form of the Arabic language. For now, begin with something simple, dip a toe into the water then gradually work towards mastery.
