The UAE’s rapid and impressive rise as one of the most dynamic nations in the world has always thrown into sharp relief a concurrent matter of keen importance for the country all along — the role of the Arabic language in its evolution.
Occupying the core of the UAE’s identity, honour and civilisational antecedents, Arabic is a nourisher for the country’s soul. As such, it needs to keep pace with the UAE’s continual progress and the country is making multitudinous efforts to ensure this pace does not falter. Integrating Arabic — not only at the grass roots level but also up to the highest level of intellectual flowering — is a goal the UAE has been pursuing all along.
In this context, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority’s (KHDA) decision to focus on improving the teaching methodologies of Arabic in schools during the current academic year is to be welcomed. For a while now, the teaching of Arabic in schools has been guilty of falling into a rote routine that leaves students uninspired and disinterested to learn this rich, beautiful language. This state of affairs is due to a paucity of good Arabic teachers as well as the methodology of teaching.
The What Works event, being organised by the KHDA on September 29, will focus on this and other issues to breathe new life into the way Arabic is perceived, taught and received and result in making the learning of a new language an exciting quest, and not a chore tied to obtaining good grades.
This milestone is on the same path as is the UAE’s larger goal of promoting the Arabic language in more vigorous ways across all streams, with the help of the Mohammad Bin Rashid Arabic Language Award. This Award works towards a greater penetration of the language into the country’s socio-cultural fabric, encourages innovation of teaching methodologies and aims to densify its daily usage.
These initiatives are crucial to enabling the UAE possess an intellectual equipoise that conducts itself both in the language of tradition and in the tones of contemporaneity, and be felicitously understood by the world in both.
