Participants during the event.
Doha, Qatar: QatarDebate, a member of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, in collaboration with the Center for Arabic Language and Debate Studies at Fatih Sultan Mehmet University, organised the “Academy of Debates and Arabic Language” on June 7-12 in Istanbul, Turkiye.
About 50 Arabic language lecturers and professors from different universities in southern Turkiye participated in the Academy, namely the regions of “Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraş, Antakya, Kilis, Sanliurfa” that were severely affected by the earthquake.
Including 25 Arabic language teachers from secondary schools in Istanbul in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, which nominated these teachers with high experience and professional competence to manage the debate championship that will be held in collaboration with the Ministry of Education in the upcoming days.
The programme was divided into two phases and over a period of six days, the first three days were allocated to four qualified teams from the semi-finals of the national debating championships, in addition to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet University team, these five teams took training in debate skills and how to employ them correctly in cases and identify the methods of analysis and tasks of the two teams within the debates through enhanced applications of the content, with the aim of qualifying to participate in the next International Debate Championship in the Doha, Qatar.
The second phase is a workshop for Arabic language teachers titled: The use of debate in teaching and curricula for teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, and it lasted for three days. It aimed to review the methods of activating debate in the classroom and using this skill in schools and universities.
Abdul Samad Kocak from Fatih Sultan Mehmet University said: “We cannot fail to note that the program takes into account the varying levels of the participants, as the trainees were divided into two groups, whose training was supervised by Turkish and Arab students from Fatih Sultan Mehmet University, Ibn Khaldun University, Marmara University and Istanbul University, where the trainers taught methods of teaching Arabic to non-native speakers.”
“Moreover, we seek through these workshops to find a base of professors and trainers familiar with debates, who deal with students directly, involve them in trainings and encourage students to learn debate skills.”
The topics dealt with by the students included teaching receptive skills - listening and reading, productive skills - speaking and writing, grammar skills in modern educational chains, and the foundations of teaching Arabic for the introductory level, the Turkish environment as a model.
