The Pilot Model for Teaching Written Presentation: Writing of the Imaginary Text as a Sample

Abstract

Arabic is considered one of the most important components that constitute the national, cultural, individual, and collective identity of the Arab pupil. On the one hand, it has a fundamental role in the pupil’s life because through it, he expresses his thoughts, his feelings, and his needs. On the other hand, through it, he acquires and creates knowledge.

However, this language is facing a lot of challenges that make the mission of teaching Arabic a complex one due to the phenomenon of diglossia, of colloquial Arabic ('Ammiyya/Darija) and Standard Arabic (Fusha). People throughout the Arab world communicate in their local dialects of colloquial Arabic while standard (fusha) Arabic is used only on formal occasions, in official correspondence, and at governmental offices.

         The challenges of the era and the development of technology and sciences, and people’s resort to teaching courses of distant learning, especially during the recent period of the Corona pandemic, created a need to develop new teaching methods that help the pupils master all the aspects and the four language skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing.

         Since writing is the ultimate result that the pupil has to acquire and control perfectly, he also has to acquire a lot of skills and make a lot of follow-up. Due to this new development, I chose to focus in this research on a pilot model in teaching written presentation, which I have developed in response to the new circumstances and the need to provide Arabic teachers with new, systematic, gradual methods of teaching the writing skills that are based on the pupils’ needs, on the one hand, and the needs of the environment and the modern era, on the other.

This study is an article in a series of forthcoming articles that will deal with teaching various literary genres through a pilot model of teaching written presentation. I chose to start here with the genre of imaginary fictional writing that is based on the existence of events of fantasy weaving, which cannot take place in reality due to the challenges and aesthetics that exists in this kind of fictional art.