What I’ve Done to Get the Most out of My Preply Arabic Lessons (as an English teacher)

I recently took up Arabic after about a ten year hiatus. I am about an A2, and I take one lesson per week. This is not a review of my teacher, whom I would highly recommend, but a summary of my own learning habits for getting the most out of my weekly hour. I share this because what you get out of a class is only partly what your teacher does. A lot is what you do.

Before I started class:

1. Decided exactly what I want to learn. In my case, I wanted to improve my MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) and learn some spoken Palestinian Arabic simultaneously.
2. Picked a teacher whose bio mentions EXACTLY what I was interested in (MSA and spoken Palestinian Arabic) and who had at least a few years of experience teaching exactly those things. I had briefly chatted with one other teacher who did not specialize in MSA, but who said that she could get some MSA materials together. Knowing how hard it is to teach new things for the first time, I went with the teacher who already had experience teaching MSA instead. The other teacher may have been up for the task, but if your teacher has to be one lesson ahead of you, so to speak, it is not sustainable. I wanted a teacher who had walked this path before. And yes, she is young, but has gained experience teaching formal classes to groups of people.
3. I picked my teacher according to her expertise, not according to the cheapest price. It is very difficult to know if a wage in another country is good. What my teacher in Palestine charges is about what I, as a teacher with 18 years of experience, would charge here in Colombia. It felt like like an investment I could afford. I know that not everybody can afford it, but if you can, I suggest looking for expertise over a few bucks this way or that way.
4. Communicated to my teacher that I wanted to learn: reading, writing, speaking, and listening, MSA and Palestinian Arabic.

Between classes:

1. In addition to the homework assigned, I started writing small past tense “stories,” summaries of what I did over the weekend, for example. I wrote different ones and included a whole cast of characters from my life, in order to conjugate verbs according to many different pronouns.
2. I constantly self-monitor for gaps in my writing. Did I know what tense or conjugation to use after a subordinator (Ex: After waking up / wake up? /I wake up?/that I wake up?)? Did I know how to punctuate a certain subordinator? Did I know how to connect phrases like “She asked me to…?” “I did X in order to Y?” “What conjunctions come after these verbs (interested in/on/about?)?” I asked the teacher to learn these. She often also spontaneously taught me these patterns. In what felt like a mutual professional assessment between experienced teachers, we both realized I need more connectors, and my teacher delivered.
3. I do not use AI to correct my writing. That is what my teacher does better. For now, I am still at a level where AI might correct things in ways that are too advanced for me, rendering it pedagogically useless. Instead, I let my teacher pick the errors that she, according to her pedagogical judgment, feels that are within my zone of proximal development, and we work on that.
4. I do not use AI to correct my writing, Part II: I need my teacher to see my mistakes. That is how she tailors the classes to my needs.
5. Yes, I might look up a word here or there, but I try to only look up as many words as I could realistically learn in one sitting one to three per paragraph). In fact, sometimes, I first write the word as I think it is, then cross it out with one line, leaving my mistake visible, and then insert the correct word. This way, I communicate to my teacher “this is something I did not know and had to look up, and this is what I thought it was.”
6. After about 7 classes, I realized I had gotten a ton of input, but needed a lot of recycling to truly aquire it. I made a list of all the vocabulary I had encountered, about 60 verbs, 10 connectors, and some set expressions. What did I need in order to truly learn these verbs? How much time would I need to get there? What “product” would I show in order to get there? When I knew:
7. I wrote my teacher and asked for an exam two months from then, explaining what I wanted to be tested on (writing paragraphs in the past tense with the verbs encountered, with good connectors, conjugated for various pronouns). I asked not to learn new content, just to really practice this one goal. She happily agreed.
8. I had already listened to MSA videos on Youtube. After realizing that my goal is to learn to write good past-tense paragraphs, I started listening to videos that told past-tense stories. I listened while doing the dishes, while riding the Transmilenio, while walking in the park. This “woke up” a lot of latent vocabulary and connectors that I had heard before, but were not part of my repertoir. It also served as a model for EXACTLY the type of writing I wanted to do: narrative simple events in the past tense.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Giving Feedback to my Teacher

I think that teaching private lessons is a lot more challenging than teaching a class. If I teach a class, my students have been placed in it through a placement exam. There is a syllabus and assessments that serve as moments to take stock. What has been learned and what needs review? But adult students who take lessons might not want exams. They want “just conversation” or “just fun.” Yet they might not improve if you do not push just a bit beyond fun. But if you are too demanding, maybe they feel stressed and quit. If you are not demanding enough, maybe they feel disappointed and quit.

Because those are my “unknowns” if I teach private lessons, I imagine that they might be things that my teacher thinks about, too. So I make it a point to write to her and a) ask for an activity to address a need I have identified and b) to tell her how useful certain material has been, and why, and c) that I am happy to work just on writing for now and basically, that I will not be disappointed if we do not work on speaking; we can do that later. These are the types of messages that I would like to receive as a teacher, so I send them to my teacher. I do not want her to feel pressured to constantly give me more new material, or to wonder whether I feel ready to move to the next topic. I will ask for it: “I would really like to review X for at least two more classes. I want to get really good at it!” “These are the verbs I can use, the verbs I recognize but can’t confidently use, and these are the ones I do not recognize.” I will not keep unexpressed expectations in my heart that she knows nothing about. Like in a marriage, it is not her job to make me happy by reading my mind. I am in charge of making my happiness, so I communicate clearly both what I need, and how happy I am with what she does, and I pinpoint exactly the progress I think I have made: “Before, I did not know how to use any of these verbs, etc.”

Things I will probably continue to do:

1. Think in cycles. I have never been able to do classes indefinitely, without clear goals. After I achieve my goal of writing past-tense paragraphs (at the end of July), and I see what new material we have (I believe we will do some spoken Arabic), that is when I will probably ask for my next exam: Can we work on narrating mini-stories in Palestinian Arabic, with spoken connectors? Then we don’t move on until I can do a basic version of that.
2. Know that if I continue, in a year, I will be revisiting my current goal of writing past-tense paragraphs, but in a more advanced incarnation. More complex vocabulary, new connectors, more complex events.

And of course, I do things during class as well:

1. Stay only in Arabic as much as possible.
2. Ask for clarification.
3. Feel zero embarrassment for my level and mistakes.
4. Focus on the joy of learning what I am learning now, instead of focusing on some imaginary level I would like to be at.
5. Accept that I probably make mistakes that my teacher doesn’t correct yet because correcting them would require grammatical explanations that are way above my level. Accept those explanations without stress when she does give them; they are a preview of what is to come, not a rabbit-hole I have to master.