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home / papers / 2024 / Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles

Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles

Summary

This is a qualitative classroom study, not an NLP paper. It examines how Darul Falah International School, an Islamic boarding school in Bagon, Mataram (Indonesia), teaches Nahwu (Arabic syntax) with "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum." The book is an Indonesian-language, four-volume primer from the Sidogiri boarding school, designed to make reading classical Arabic texts quicker for beginners. Data came from observation, interviews and documents collected in the 2022/2023 school year, and were analysed through reduction, display and verification.

Lessons follow a pre-lesson, core and closing structure. The core runs as an inductive cycle: a text, comprehension questions, reading aloud, worked examples, deriving the rule from the text, then exercises.

The authors list obstacles on both sides:

  • Students: trouble reading script on the board, volume-specific grammatical hurdles, boredom, and lessons lost when the teacher is absent.
  • Teachers: latecomers, students without books, no revision in the dormitory, difficulty gauging real ability, classroom management, and motivating learners.

The study matters as a practical record of where a graded grammar curriculum breaks down.

Key points

  • Programme and source: The school started its Al-Miftah programme in 2018, after some of its people trained as teachers at Sidogiri (Pasuruan). The book was written by Qusyairi Ismail in 2011.
  • Daily routine: The day opens with one hour of "Lalaran," chanting verb conjugation (taṣrīf) and reciting the Qur'an. Hours two to five are then given to Al-Miftah lessons.
  • Volume content:
    • Volume 1: basic units such as sentences, words, verb forms and nouns.
    • Volume 2: adjectives, gender and number.
    • Volume 3: harder morphology, such as maqṣūr, mazīd and mabnī forms.
    • Volume 4: full iʿrāb reading, plurals and words with irregular readings.
  • Supporting material: Songs drawn from Alfiyya Ibn Malik and Naẓm al-Jurumiyya reinforce the content.
  • Where students struggle by volume:
    • Volume 1: changing a word into a target pattern, such as dual or plural.
    • Volume 2: telling look-alike categories apart.
    • Volume 3: deciding a verb's form or number, and whether it is regular.
    • Volume 4: following the context of complex sentences.
  • Background matters: Students without prior madrasah diniyah or Qur'an-kindergarten schooling had the most trouble reading the board.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The rule is never given first: learners meet a real text, answer questions, read it aloud, and only then extract the grammatical rule before practising it. Abstracting a rule from attested examples tends to stick better than a top-down statement. — For Mova (learn): Self-induced repair rules could follow the same order, starting from clusters of concrete parse errors, abstracting a candidate rule, then checking it on fresh exercises before adoption.
  • I2. The curriculum moves from word classes, to agreement features, to irregular morphology, to full case-reading of complex sentences, and the hardest failures appear only at the final, context-dependent stage. A staged curriculum like this shows exactly where competence breaks. — For Mova (answer): School-course tests could be organised in the same graded tiers, so a failure is located at the first stage where the reader breaks down rather than reported as one overall score.
  • I3. Asked as a group whether they understood, children stayed silent or chimed in agreement, but questioning them one by one showed many could not answer. Aggregate self-reported confidence hides individual gaps. — For Mova (learn): Evaluation should probe each item individually and include negative controls, rather than trusting averaged confidence or a model's own claim that a case is handled.
  • I4. Students struggled to fix a word's grammatical state or ending until they grasped the surrounding sentence, so morphology alone was not enough in the advanced volumes. Ending decisions depend on structure, not just the word form. — For Mova (tree): Where feature assignment is ambiguous, morphological choices could be revisited after parsing, letting the dependency relation decide instead of a context-free tagger guess.
  • I5. Daily chanted drilling of conjugation paradigms (Lalaran) keeps the full inflection tables fresh as a routine warm-up. A small, always-run paradigm check catches basic regressions cheaply. — For Mova (tokens): Complete English inflection paradigms could run as a quick regression suite before each training or release, flagging any lemma or morphology drift.

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 10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146

@article{zakiya2024using,
  title = {{Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles}},
  author = {Zakiya, Fina Hida and Kasih, Baiq Widia Nita and Jamhuri, Wirawan},
  journal = {Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching 1},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146}
}

References

21 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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