DOHA: A panel session at the ninth Al Jazeera Forum yesterday discussed the difficulties facing Arab migrants in non-Arab countries in teaching their children the Arabic language.
Speakers at the session entitled “new interactive and educational horizons of e-journalism,” also highlighted the importance of digital education and the experience of Al Jazeera Net, organisers of the seminar, in this field.
Dr Sawsan Al Sadafi, director of programmes at the Future Institute in Paris (FIP), said that the Arabic language, despite migrants’ increasing demand for it, faced many obstacles to its global expansion including the lack of opportunities for learning it in schools, in turn resulting in weak fluency among the children of migrant families.
She warned that the Arabic language is no longer an option for future professional education in spite of its successful introduction and integration in Western countries, suggesting that “we must admit that the time allocated for practicing this language is not enough to make it a living language among Arab communities.”
Al Sadafi maintained that among the obstacles facing the Arabic language in countries of emigration was that the younger generations perceived it as interactively and socially foreign. Thus, sporadically, those generations end up suffering from acute psychological problems and feelings of alienation even from themselves.
“At our institution we were able to finally establish in the minds of our students that they were first Muslims, then Europeans. This has helped them lead a better life thanks to curricula and lessons objectively formed to cultivate the Arabic Language in its new Western reality,” she said.
Mohammed bin Masood, director of programs at Afaq Group, stressed the importance of digital education as a replacement to traditional education, calling for the improvement of the educational process to become more compatible with modern technology to improve students’ potential for education, understanding, and practice.
Dr Mokhtar Ahmed, linguistic supervisor at Al Jazeera’s distance learning Arabic language website, discussed the experience of the website, highlighting the most positive results it has reached ever since its creation. He also talked about the objectives behind this specialised website. “The website comes within the context of Al Jazeera’s initiative to benefit from modern technology to promote and serve the Arab-Muslim civilization everywhere”, he asserted.
The second part of the session focused on the “Tools and problems and Arabic language” in which experts asserted that the challenges emerging from the weakness of Arabic language content comes from the inability to keep up with technology. The percentage of informational content available online in Arabic does not exceed 3 percent, 80 percent of which is useless.
The speaker argued that this resulted from the challenges of using internet in the Arab world including the weakness of online content and blocked information. Therefore, a massive segment of online users were using other languages in research engines, whereas 41 percent of users saw that the shortage of the content stopped them from doing research in their native language.
The Peninsula
