David M. Duerden and Dr. Kirk Belnap, Asian and Near Eastern Languages
This project built on a National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC) project to provide BYU students, and eventually students around the country, with audio and video exposure to native Arabic speakers and everyday-life situations in the Middle East.
This was of particular importance since learning a foreign language, especially one as foreign as Arabic, requires more than just classroom practice and book study. To begin to get a feel for Arabic, one has to have exposure to Arabs using it naturally, and better still, see it used in everyday situations. The footage we collected will help provide this as well as a better understanding of the people and culture whose language is being studied. This footage, as a part of BYU’s and the NMELRC’s continuing efforts, will help provide new aspects of linguistic and cultural understanding that were previously unique to firsthand, in-country experiences.
For this project, we chose to focus on Egyptian colloquial Arabic because it is a widely understood dialect throughout the Arab world: due mainly to Egypt’s prominence in the production of movies and media in the Middle East. We decided to take advantage of the BYU study abroad to Alexandria, Egypt to help facilitate the travel and filming of colloquial Egyptian Arabic.
Upon arriving in Alexandria, Erin Olsen and I began making contacts and finding people whom we could film for these language learning videos. We also used the other BYU students on the study abroad program, as a sort of resource, to help find good native participants for the video material. In the end, we were able to find people willing to speak with us from various social classes and were very excited to find a few families that allowed us to tape their children for possible future projects of teaching Arabic to American children in K-12.
While we did find native speakers to participate in our language acquisition videos, it was more difficult than had been expected. At first, many people were extremely wary about speaking on camera about anything. There was a basic fear that something they said might be taken badly and get back to the government and cause them trouble. I was even asked directly a couple of times to make sure I didn’t give this tape to any of the government agencies. Our native friends were not being asked to talk on any sort of topic that we would consider sensitive, but even topics like “Everyday Life” and “Differences between Egypt and the United States” seemed to give people pause. There was a good deal of cultural sensitivity we had to learn throughout this process. We were lucky that we were on a full semester study abroad, that gave us time to establish the relationships of trust needed to get people to speak on video.
Our original plan had been to script simple scenes or topics for native speakers to talk about, but it became evident that in trying to script scenes, we were going to impose non-native speech patterns and subject matters. It also became evident that our participants were becoming preoccupied with saying exactly what was in the script rather than speaking normally and smoothly as they usually would in everyday conversation. Recognizing this, I scrapped the scripting and simply gave them topics and basic direction on what they should include in their “free speak” with the camera.
From this give-and-take of guided “free speak” came the inspiration to have our friends speak as long as they wanted on the given topic, i.e. “marriage”, and then have them start over and summarize what they said in slower more simple language. That way, on each topic, we had material that could be used for advanced Arabic students as well as beginning Arabic students. This is a strategy that worked very well and that we plan in incorporate while filming later this year in Syria.
While we did have good equipment (Panasonic DVC80 mini-DV digital video camera, wireless microphones and receivers, tripod, etc), we encountered the usual problems of obtaining exciting footage (outdoors) verses trying to get good audio quality (indoors). This being footage for language acquisition videos, we decided that having excellent audio was more important and therefore did most of our filming indoors. But while we did do our dialogue filming inside, we also took “B-role” of the interesting sites and outdoor places that we had our native speakers talk about in hopes that the editing process will allow us to maintain the audio quality and overlay the more interesting outdoor scenes.
During this project, we obtained over 12 hours of footage of native speakers talking freely on a large list of topics; the majority of which we hope will be good usable material. These additions to the small library of Arabic language acquisition materials are very important. Research has proven two factors to be critical to successful second language acquisition: exposure to (1) a good deal of comprehensible input and (2) interaction. Unfortunately, Arabic learners are typically exposed to an impoverished diet of barely comprehensible or stilted written texts. With this new footage we feel we have made an excellent contribution to the amount of comprehensible input BYU students, and others around the country, can now be exposed to.
We are very pleased with the way this project turned out. Of course, not everything went according to plan, and there are several things that I would change if I had it to do over again. But this project was a success. It not only served BYU and the greater academic community in obtaining Arabic language acquisition materials, but it was also an opportunity to form friendships and working relationships with Egyptians and fellow BYU students that will, hopefully, stay with us forever.