Kurt is teaching Arabic. Is Kurt participating in a lesson or teaching Arabic. Apart from the challenge of online teaching and its technical challenges, matters are complicated by a hand-held reversible mini-whiteboard. This hardware reverses the Arabic script, which is already written right to left and not left to right, as English is. Obstacles create accidents and the makeshift egg-box is a workaround that will prevent anything audio waves bouncing against the walls of the 'classroom'. Kurt need to find a better venue.
Amongst some teachers of Arabic as a Foreign Language (Familiar, 2019) there is interest in psychologies of learning (Smith and Firth, 2018) for 'active learning' or 'movement in learning'. Performance does not need to be overt. In the Arabic Stage 1 course at Salford University there is also an undeclared system of getting students actively to converse with each other about their understanding, to work together on making sense of sounds, phrases, grammatical principles like the Nominal sentence. Maybe Kurt could learn something from that. Students listen to their tutor as he switches increasingly between Arabic and English, at a level that is always slightly ahead of the comprehension for the level and this 'stretches' the students' vocabulary, in ways that Stephen Kaufmann and Krashen have long advocated.
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