Teaching Observation

I had the pleasure of observing Wessam Abdelaziz, a graduate teaching assistant at the
Department of World Languages, while teaching ARAB 1010 (Elementary Arabic II). The
observation took place on February 16, 2016 in 3002 Brown Hall at 10:00-10:50 AM.
The class started promptly with the students and the instructor seeming well-prepared and
enthusiastic. Wessam did a quick warm-up using the target language in a natural way. He used
recently introduced vocabulary items and linguistic structures to ask each student a series of
short questions to elicit response with past and present tense copular sentences. The warm up
established a friendly atmosphere, reviewed previous lessons, and foreshadowed the linguistic
structures targeted for the rest of the class. The warm-up ended with Wessam making a list of
class objectives on the board.
The main objective for this class was introducing the Arabic broken plurals. These are plural
nouns formed by manipulating the melodic structure of the singular roots rather than adding
suffixes. Wessam used three different activities to achieve this objective. These included a group
work task where students matched pairs of cards with nouns and their plurals. They had to guess
which nouns had which plurals based on the consonantal roots. The second activity involved all
the students using Blu-Tak to form groups of card pairs on the board based on their plural
patterns. The third activity had the students use rhyme and rhythm to internalize the plural
patterns and use them in meaningful new sentences. All three activities were quite engaging, as
all the students actively participated. They were well-structures and organized from the simpler
to the more complex sub-tasks. Wessam adopted a clearly defined step-by-step approach to
teaching grammar, moving from controlled to open ended tasks. He let students offer feedback to
each other as they discovered the plural patterns. He offered direct feedback only when students
were struggling or when they were offering inaccurate feedback. The lesson ended with an
exercise from the textbook, which they were instructed to complete at home as homework.
What was very interesting about Wessams teaching is how he planned, designed, and delivered
the activities in a way that accommodates the students different proficiency levels. More
importantly, his approach not only helped his students figure out the plural patterns of Arabic,
but how the Arabic root-and-pattern morphological system works. Their experience learning the
plural will facilitate all their future learning of Arabic. In fact, the learning by discovery
approach he adopted in this lesson has long term effects on students critical thinking. They were
engaged in categorization, collecting data, positing hypotheses, and testing them. Overall, the
class was organized, well-paced, and quite engaging, especially when the students were signing
Wessams plural song.
Mustafa Mughazy, Ph.D.