Linking Arabic language to the CEFR to assign a clear academic progress pathway Amira Mills and Najwa Kadhim, Kings College London

The demand for studying Arabic has increased in the recent years. In order to meet this demand, Arabic language as a full degree, joint honours or an evening course has appeared as an option on most if not all of the UK universities list. In the process, several courses were introduced at different levels. It was therefore important to link the language to the CEFR to assign a clear academic progress pathway. While it is easy for most of the other languages, Arabic represents us with a challenge. The language consists of two main components: the standard modern form used in the academic field and most of the printed materials, news and media, and several other varieties in the communicative area. Another challenge was setting up the assessment criteria and credit levels. Several points had to be taken into consideration when assessing the different language skills, such as minimum number of words, whether the spoken variety can be accepted in oral assessments and if so which form of variety, how much of the grammatical structure should be observed in these varieties.

University of Leeds

3/28/2017 8:07:14 AM