Click here to see the new blog home. 

Finally, I’ve moved this blog to a more suitable location. It’s on my domain so there is more flexibility, and I don’t have to worry about ads. Right now it’s running a little slow, but that should change soon. Go check it out and tell me what you think!

The OPI will be taken by every advanced student at some point. 10-30 minutes on the phone in an all-Arabic meandering conversation, focused on eliciting opinions and stories from the test taker. I took my first OPI with the State Department, and completed a second test for the University of Maryland Flagship Program.  

Preparation

The first time I took an OPI I was still reading Al-Kitaab vol. II.  My week long preparation was simply ‘study more Arabic’.

This time I knew better. When I found out I was shortlisted for UMD, my first instinct was to read more news in Arabic. But upon reflection I concluded this was the wrong approach. With two days to prepare, I had to focus. I tried to find news reports on things that would likely come up in the test, such as the financial crisis or news about Obama’s speech in front of Congress.  I remembered my experience being flustered trying to explain the reasons for the weakness of the dollar in September, and so probably overfocused on economic issues.

Then I prepared a list of questions, recorded myself speaking them, and then recorded my answers in an attempt to identify systematic errors. For an example of the limits of my abilities, you can listen to me flounder trying to explain my opinion on the auto industry bailout.

Finally, I loaded up Skype and had an hour-long conversation with a Saudi language exchange partner in Medina the night before the test.

General Structure

The purpose of the OPI is to dial in language ability quickly, for any level on the ILR scale. Testers are paired with a native speaker who asks questions, and there is often another observer in the room. The first thing the tester will do is establish an upper and lower limit to conversational skills. Based on my experience, the lower bound can be a topic like the weather, and the upper bound is an obscure or technical news topic. Finally, the tester can read an article in English and then ask the applicant to translate. There was no translation during my first OPI, likely because it was clear my proficiency was not advanced.

This Test

Immediately after introductions, we started out with the weather, where I complained about the snow in Seattle. Dr. Abdelfattah then asked me to ‘describe myself’ which led into a conversation about why I have three degrees and why I would choose to do Islamic studies even though I could earn more in Computer Science. We then moved to politics: ‘ماذا رأيك عن أوباما؟’ a question has come up on every Arabic test this year. We talked about the economy, مما I talked about layoffs at Microsoft and attempted to describe how the recession was helping me: Deep recession يسبب quantitative easing يسبب inflation يسبب real value of student loans to decrease. I was surprised at how naturally the conversation flowed. Everything was a topic I have at some point discussed with a stranger at my favorite café. Finally, he read a BBC news article in English, which I had to summarize and give an opinion on in Arabic. I had some trouble describing the ‘vegetative state’ mentioned in the article, to which I said something like “ظرف جمدي”. I probably should have said ‘غيبوبة’ or ‘كوما’ or even ‘ظرف مجمد’.  

Thoughts

For a test designed to produce a quantified score, results are hard to come by. When I took the OPI with the State Department in September, I only was notified that I passed, meaning I had an ILR score at least 2. This time I was hoping to achieve a 3, though I will not be privy to the results. Both times, the tester spoke Fusha مطلقاً and the only عامية  عباراتin the conversation were my vestigial ‘أيوه’s from time in Syria.

Call quality is a big issue. The State Department insisted that I call from a land line, and I had to call from a café: bad idea. This time I used my cellphone at my house and the tester did not use speakerphone, making the test much easier. 

Have any horror stories from Arabic phone interviews? Let me know in the comments below. 

How do you render an Arab speechless?

تعقيد يديه

(You tie his hands)

Anecdotal evidence abounds in how gestures relate to expressing language, few have focused on how gesturing can help learning.  For example ISP Nation’s book on vocabulary acquisition contains no references to gestures, and it is nearly impossible for Arabic textbooks to deal with gestures other than the ones that differ wildly from western tradition: i.e. hand on the head, eyes up etc. 

But don’t let that stop you from waving your arms like a madman! Research is showing that gesturing plays a key role in problem solving. According to the Economist:

Dr Goldin-Meadow had noted that children often use spontaneous gestures when explaining how they solve mathematical puzzles so, to see if these hand-movements actually help a child to think, or are merely descriptive, she divided a group of children into two and asked them to balance equations. One group was asked to gesture while doing so. A second was asked not to. Both groups were then given a lesson in how to solve problems of this sort.

As Dr Goldin-Meadow suspected, the first group learnt more from the lesson than the second. By observing their gestures she refined the experiment. Often, a child would touch or point to the first two numbers on the left with the first two fingers of one hand. Dr Goldin-Meadow therefore taught this gesture explicitly to another group of children. Or, rather, she taught a third of them, taught another third to point to the second and third numbers this way, and told the remainder to use no gestures. When all were given the same lesson it was found those gesturing “correctly” learnt the most. But those gesturing “incorrectly” still outperformed the non-gesturers.

Gestures are also key to vocabulary development in infants. A recent report published in Science  found the following:

The level of gesturing at 14 months is linked to the vocabulary level at 4.5 years; the income and education of parents also played a role. For instance, during the first session, the children from high-income households gestured 24 times, compared to 13 gestures from kids in low-income homes. And when both groups were tested for vocabulary, the kids from the high-income families scored 117, compared to 93 in the other group.

This matches with my experience. When studying endless Arabic wordlists, I have found it helpful to use gestures in memorizing  vocabulary. Here’s a few examples from recent words on my list:

Finally, let’s not forget the other benefits of gestures, they increase fluency and can be more persuasive. Just check out this interview of Bashar al-Assad while he was in Paris last year. His hands are constantly moving!

Original review مكتبوب بالعربية مالكسورة:

This is the perspective of reading the book in Arabic from a native English speaker:

How do I describe a collection of short stories like this? Clearly, it is impossible to doubt the quality of the stories, each of which was interesting and entertaining in its own right. My favorites were the ‘Tale of the Lamp’ in which we see a starved traveler stumble upon a rich kingdom, and ‘The Night and the Sea’ which painted a bleak but moving picture with its rich descriptions and overwhelming emotions.

Unfortunately, the beautiful use of language means that the language is also suitably hard. Devilishly hard. Consider the first sentence of the first (supposedly easiest) story:

“اشتهيت الازاد و انا ببغداد، عفواً، بل زعموا  والله اعلم أن سنة جفاف و القحط و المحل و المجاعة و المسغبة عفانا الله!” (حكاية القنديل ص ١٧)

They claimed, and god knows it was true, that it was a year of drought, famine, misery, hunger and starvation, god preserve us all.  P. 18

Or this sentence from Naguib Mahfouz’s short story about Siamese twins:

“و فارت من الأعماق موجة عمياء جرفت ستر الحياء، فارتطم  الاندفاع بالندم” (قسمتي و نصيبي ١٢٦)

They would clash in a vortex of fiery and crazed outbursts. A raging wave would emerge from the depths, removing any sense of shame while impetuosity superseded regret. P. 126

I would like to think of myself as an advanced student, despite my terrible writing, but I found many of these stories extraordinarily hard. Were it not for the translations in English these stories would have been too much to handle. I tried to read the entire Arabic story before resorting to the English translation however I found myself switching back after only a page to make sure that I understood the next section in Arabic. Also, when I showed the book to a group of Saudi friends, and as soon as one opened up the book and read the first sentence, one asked me ماذا  قنديل؟ after saying, “This stuff is hard for us too.”

Considering the difficulty of the texts, the structure of footnotes and translation is important. But I was disappointed by how the book placed footnotes and the end of the story, necessitating multiple bookmarks and needless page flipping. Worse, the translations did not line up with the Arabic, and often spilled over on to the next page. So reading these stories was harder than it could have been.

In the end, the important thing is that there are translations, and for that this book deserves praise. But be warned, if you want to read this for its Arabic content, be prepared for a challenge. 

3.5/5 Stars

Appropriate Level: 2+to 5

For information on the contained short stories, check out this blog.

Justify it to yourself by telling yourself there are a few good vocab words in there.

Via a Saudi friend on Facebook.

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Click here to see the current blog!

Official Description of the Program

Official Description af the Test

Flight to Baltimore, light rail to Camden Yards, MARC to College Park station, shuttle to UMD campus, and a mercifully short walk through the bitter cold to Jimenez hall and the test. When I walked into the room, the Hans-Wehr situated within arm’s reach of every waiting student confirmed I was in the right place.

The tests revealed the diversity, if paucity, of Arabic students in America. There was David, who spent a year in Sana’a, Kat, who was in her 3^rd year with Johns Hopkins Arabic, Evan and Rachel, who had both spent a year at ALI and everyone else that I didn’t get a chance to talk to. Oddly, there were no conversations in Arabic, as if everyone was hoarding linguistic skills for the test.   So the group sat and chatted nervously until 10:00 came and the program director started the proceedings. Of 90 who had completed the registration, only 25 took the test in Maryland, with something like an equal number presumed to have taken the test elsewhere.

The Test 

We started with the listening section, with passages about the presidential inauguration, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and a pushy interview with an Egyptian about an Arab summit in Kuwait. All the questions were written in English (What’s up with this trend?) and the answers could be in English or in Arabic. The thing that threw me was questions with misleading information. One asked when Masdar City was expected to be completed, even though the report gave no such information. I’m not saying that I understood the whole thing with crystalline comprehension, but words likeسنة , شهر, or مستقبل  were entirely absent from the report.

The reading section was short and with weird questions. All passages were from الشرق الأوسط, one on the aftermath of Gaza, one on unemployment in Saudi Arabia due to the financial crisis, and an opinion on Syrian direct negotiations with Israel. The passages themselves were much easier than the CASA test, but the questions seemed imprecise to me: “What is your opinion on the author’s main idea?”

Finally was translation and writing. The writing prompt was something like   تكتب مقالة عن شخصية أوباما و هل تعتقد أن يرمز بداية جديدة للامريكا؟  I feel like for anyone preparing for an Arabic writing test in America, they would only need to study the most general current event in America and memorize an Arabic essay describing it. I ended up writing about his economic policies, since that’s what I was listening about on the Economist on the train to the University. I’m not sure how coherent the essay actually was. The translation was a wire report about stem cells, seemed to be the type of thing that you either understood or you didn’t.

Thoughts

There was a wide range of students taking the test. One left after the first section because the test was so far above her level. Another finished the entire test while everyone else was still on the reading section. During the break, I asked:

لماذا تريدين ان تنضمي في هذا البرنامج؟ تتكلمين و تكتبين اللغة فصيحاً و جيداً!

 قالت: نعم أعرف اللغة و لكن أريد ان أتحسن مهارة المترجمة

Still, the program only requires ‘2 years’ of Arabic or an ILR level of 1+. Perhaps the oddest thing is that the scholarship and admissions are determined completely independently. It’s possible to be admitted without the scholarship, or get the scholarship without being admitted. Federal funding at its best.

The next step of phone interviews will happen in about a week. Quick turnaround!

What does it mean to be fluent in Arabic? How can one determine ‘how well’ they know the language? There are many informal ways to measure this. How far you are in Al-Kitaab? What year of college Arabic are you in? How many swear words you know?

Currently there are two formal bodies that have attempted to quantify the answer. First is the ACTFL (American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages), which has established a scale for Arabic that ranges from novice to native. Frankly, I have never seen anybody use it.

The only thing close to a standard is the 0-5 scale by the  Interagency Language Roundtable for rating language proficiency in the areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. According to the ILR, here’s what the scale means:

0 No Proficiency: No practical ability in the language.
1 Elementary Proficiency: Able to communicate with descriptive ideas, and possibly garner the main idea from spoken or written material.
2 Limited Working Proficiency: Able to comprehend factual source material. Capable of handling limited or repeated social demands and subjects of comprehension.
3 General Professional Proficiency: Able to participate ‘effectively’ in most social and professional topics and papers.
4 Advanced Professional Proficiency: Able to use the language fluently and accurately for all professional needs.
5 Functionally Native Proficiency: Functionally equivalent to that of a highly articulate well-educated native speaker and reflects the cultural standards of the country where the language is natively used.

And to show it in practice, here’s the brakedown of FBI agents at different levels of proficiency:

I consider the above graph comic relief for an otherwise dull post. 

Problems:
The ILR scale is not without its detractors. John Eisele, of the College of William and Mary, gives the following critique:

The first thing that strikes me as odd about these guidelines as developed for Arabic is the disconnect between them and Arabic language pedagogy. This is evident in the way descriptions tend to denigrate or devalue learned or ‘rehearsed’ language at the earlier levels. This is especially so in the ILR descriptions of the first three levels in which the term learned phrases is used in a pejorative fashion as if what is ‘learned’ is being demeaned in some way, as if the truly successful examinee would acquire these phrases not by learning them by the intervention of the holy spirit.-Eisele Pg. 202 Handbook for Arabic Language Professionals in the 21st Century

Worse, the scale does nothing to address the omnipresent issue of diglossa in the Arabic language. Is it really possible to attain anything higher than a 2+ without knowing elements of both فصحى (MSA) and عامية colloquial? The scale does not address this. Instead, agencies like the State department will offer tests and give ratings in either in selected عامية (Iraqi and Egyptian, currently) or فصحى, treating them as entirely separate languages.

Use:
The main advantage of the ILR scale is to define when Arabic is considered ‘useful’ at the professional level, that is, a 3. Once an objective scale is created, it is easy to recognize the multi-level disaster that is American Arabic. More locally, I will also be using this scale to rate the difficulty and aprropriate level for Arabic learning material rather than using subjective terms like ‘for intermidiate students’. 

To the Brits, Aussies, or others learning Arabic, what scale do your governments/teaching organizations use?

So you want to type in Arabic, but installing a keyboard on your computer is too much of a hassle, or you are on a public computer and it is not an option. Yet you really need to find out the meaning of a word, or you really want to search for a term in Arabic to get some information. Impossible? Of course not! There are many services on the web that allow you to type into a software keyboard and let the browser type in Arabic. Then all you have to do is copy and paste the text and you are good to go!

First up is Google’s own tech labs product, which came out late in 2008. It takes a while to get used to at first, as it uses a direct mapping system to go from Roman to Arabic fonts, but is relatively fast once you get used to it. 

Second, is the Yamli search engine, which transliterates your English into Arabic and will then search Google for that term. I found it suprisingly accurate.

Do you use a different transliteration service? Let me know in the comments below!

The bus on the left: “Elections”

Bus on the right: “Support for peace”

The hardest skill to develop independantly for Arabic writing. Al-Kitaab arguably facilitates stylistic and vocabulary development, but its performance based approach makes most of the reading material too advanced to really emulate. (Imagine if in English the only writing samples you ever saw were Wall Street Journal editorials and Shakespeare) Worse, many Arabs don’t seem to have a good understanding of writing themselves, so conversation partners are hit and miss. 

So, sensing a gaping hole in my studies so far, I was excited to start this book. Unfortunately it turned out intermediate in vocabulary but basic in style and grammar. Save two pages, there was no analysis on style past the sentence level. Most of the book is spent on tense, such as when to use بعد ما vs. بعد أن vs. بعد. This may all be useful, but  little time is given to finer points of explanation. I think that for these rules, either grammar books or textbooks seem to be better suited. Also, most of the exercises consist of repeating in writing what the book has already written, making them nearly useless. There are annoying typos and unhelpful repetitions. It was interesting to see a book aimed towards foreigners yet written in Arabic, but in the end it doesn’t seem to work and did very little to help me. Still, the two useful pages were very useful. One was an example letter, which included greeting and concluding statements like حضرة استاذ المحترم…; the other was an example persuasive essay, which confirmed that the 5 paragraph essay model also exists in Arabic. Since I don’t think this book is worth buying, I will try to post these two pages shortly. 

2.5/5 Stars

Appropriate Level: 1+ to 2