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you are comfortable. (We do not believe you will find the differences to be very
great.)
We hope that you will make use of the accompanying video tape not only for
its linguistic value but also for its visual and cultural content. You will need to use
the tape in class in order to explain the content. We have distributed the eighteen
dialogues over the first nine units. While we have included short cultural notes in
the book meant to accompany the video scenes, we have not provided detailed
lesson plans in order to give you the flexibility to proceed as you wish and focus on
the aspects you deem important. Use the tape and cultural notes as starting points,
encourage questions and discussion, and expand as you wish. We suggest that you
have the students listen to each dialogue several times as follows: (1) Before explaining
anything, have them watch for general content, then discuss, and see what they
understood. (2) Have them watch again, as many times as necessary, to listen for
individual words or expressions, followed by discussion and explanation of what
they heard. (3) Have them watch a final time, after they have understood what is
said, to focus on how it is said. After that, the students should be ready to try out the
expressions themselves, so let them make up their own situations and act them out.
Your own contribution will be vital to the success of these materials.
Do not worry about writing out the dialogues. It is good training for the
students to develop confidence in their aural and oral skills at this stage, and they
need to be encouraged to rely on their phonographic rather than their photographic
memory. Everybody has natural aural and oral language learning skills, because
nobody learned their native language through reading. As the students master the
alphabet, they will be able to study from the transcribed texts in the appendix.
Of course, no textbook can take the place of a good teacher. It is our hope
that these materials will help you to enrich your classroom and make learning Arabic
an enjoyable experience for your students.