Designing an Arabic speaking and listening skills e-course: resources, activities and students’ perceptions

Abstract

his paper presents a fully online course model for teaching speaking and listening skills for students learning Arabic as a foreign language at the International Peace College South Africa on the NEO learning management platform. It also investigates the students' attitudes towards the course. The course was developed by the researcher during the first semester of 2020. This period coincided with South Africa’s first wave of COVID-19, and the country’s first strict lockdown. The syllabus consists of three components: Listening, speaking and conversational Arabic. It includes various technology-enhanced activities and resources which were developed by using LMS features, Web 2.0 tools, and e-learning specifications such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) and Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). The integration of technology in the course is based on an approach that combines Bloom's taxonomy and Technology Integration Matrix (TIM). Apart from the description of the course, this study used a thirty-item questionnaire to investigate the attitudes of thirty-one learners who participated in the course. They answered questions about the course’s resources, activities as well as its impact on their language skills. Results from the questionnaire revealed that the respondents' attitudes towards the online course were positive and statistically significant at p <.05. The design and the approach adopted in this study can apply to any context of language teaching. It provides a myriad of technology-enhanced activities that can be effectively used to teach listening and speaking skills virtually. Foreign language teachers can adopt this approach in its entirety, or with idiosyncratic modifications to design their language courses, irrespective of the virtual learning ecology (VLE) they use.