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Streamlining Arabic Grammar to Facilitate Mastery of Qirâ’at al-Kutub for University Students

Summary

The paper looks at university students in Indonesia who find Qirâ’at al-Kutub hard. Qirâ’at al-Kutub is the reading of classical Arabic texts, usually without vowel marks. The authors argue that traditional grammar teaching overloads students with definitions and classifications. As an alternative, they built a reduced syllabus that keeps only the grammar needed for reading and teaches recurring sentence patterns rather than full rule systems. The syllabus moves in four steps: words, then multi-word constructions, then sentences, then applied reading drills.

The study is a qualitative case study of 37 Islamic Education students at UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung. Data came from interviews, classroom observation, questionnaires and pre/post tests, analysed thematically and with descriptive statistics. Mean scores rose from 65 to 85, and specific grammatical error rates fell sharply. Weaker students gained the most. However, most students still asked for more materials and for help with difficult texts.

The work matters as a practical model of grammar for reading. The evidence is limited: one institution, a small sample, and no control group.

Key points

  • The sample was 37 students (24 male, 13 female) enrolled in Islamic Education studies at UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung during the spring 2023 semester, selected purposively because they had prior Qirâ’at al-Kutub experience.
  • The syllabus has four topics:
    • Word: verb forms mâḍî, muḍâri‘ and amr; mabnî vs mu‘rab nouns; particles that affect i‘râb.
    • Construction: attributive, annexation, emphatic, appositive and relative constructions, and the relation between their parts.
    • Sentence: verbal vs nominal sentences, expanding a sentence from its noun or verb, and analysis by predicate, subject and complement (musnad, musnad ilayh, faḍla).
    • Reading application: drills on sentences and on whole texts.
  • Test results:
    • The mean score went from 65 to 85 (a 20-point gain). The top quartile went from 78 to 92.
    • Fi‘il muḍâri‘ errors fell from 40% to 10%, and i‘râb errors fell from 50% to 15%.
    • The conclusion reports that nahw understanding rose from 50% to 90%.
  • Student feedback:
    • 86–88% reported better confidence and comprehension (the paper gives both figures).
    • 82% wanted more resources, and 68% wanted support for complex texts.
  • Male and female students improved by similar amounts, and the bottom-quartile students showed the largest relative improvement.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Teach a compact set of frequent sentence patterns instead of an exhaustive rule taxonomy, so readers recognise structure directly in real text. — For Mova (tree): A small inventory of high-frequency construction templates could serve as an explainable fallback or check when the perceptron parser or gparse is unsure on common shapes.
  • I2. Build skills bottom-up in a fixed order: word, then construction, then sentence, then full-text reading. Each layer reuses the previous one. — For Mova (learn): Training and self-play could follow the same curriculum, mastering morphology and phrase relations before sentence-level and document-level tasks.
  • I3. Analyse every sentence into three parts: the predicate, what it is said about, and optional extras (musnad / musnad ilayh / faḍla). This gives a simple core-versus-periphery view of the clause. — For Mova (frames): A first pass could split core participants from adjuncts before VerbNet role assignment, which simplifies who-did-what-to-whom extraction and its explanation.
  • I4. Measure progress through named error categories (verb-form errors, case-ending errors) as well as an overall score. This shows where a method actually helps. — For Mova (learn): Evaluations could report per-category error rates, such as tense, agreement or attachment, before and after a repair rule or retraining, instead of a single aggregate.
  • I5. Break results down by initial ability, so you can see whether a method helps the weakest performers most. — For Mova (answer): Results on school-course tests and fable QA could be stratified by question difficulty, to check whether improvements reach the hard cases or only lift the easy ones.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15408/a.v11i2.42517

@inproceedings{ardiansyah2025streamlining,
  title = {{Streamlining Arabic Grammar to Facilitate Mastery of Qirâ’at al-Kutub for University Students}},
  author = {Ardiansyah, Ade Arip and Musthafa, Izzuddin and Syafei, Isop and Sanah, Siti},
  booktitle = {Arabiyat 11},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.15408/a.v11i2.42517},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15408/a.v11i2.42517}
}

References

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