Teaching Arabic to Native Speakers - Educational Games in a New Curriculum.

This paper presents nine educational games and activities for learning the Arabic language. The games are developed for Arabiyyatii project, a three-year endeavor that involves re-conceptualization of the curriculum of standard Arabic as a first language in kindergarten. The applications presented in this paper are developed on tabletop surface computers that support a collaborative and interactive learning environment. These applications focus on speaking drills, word production, and sentence recognition of Modern Standard Arabic. This work incorporates an interdisciplinary research framework exploiting best practices used from related disciplines namely: computer-supported collaborative learning, language learning, teaching and learning pedagogy, instructional design and scaffolding.