Towards Effective Method in Teaching Arabic Poetry for Malaysian

Abstract

This study deliberates on the problem of teaching Arabic poetry to Malay

students in Malaysia. Arabic is the third language after Malay and English,

taught in Malaysia. In fact, Arabic letters are introduced and taught in preschool

level to enable Malay students to read Qur’an and written texts in

Jawi, which is dependent on the Arabic letters.

This study also looks into the teaching of Arabic as a core subject in

public schools, which relies heavily on memorization of vocabulary and

grammatical rules and to composition of sentences. The above method of

teaching at this stage has been found to be similar to the method applied in

the Middle East, where Arabic is the mother tongue.

This study highlights the problems and challenges faced by Malay

students in public schools in the teaching of Arabic literature. These problems

revolve around three main domains: teaching literature as a component in

language teaching, lack of knowledge about cultures and societies that exist

in the Arab countries, lack of emotional attachment to the given subject, lack

of teaching method, and the inability to transfer the techniques used in the

Malay language into similar cases in Arabic language.

This study has depended primarily on Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning. It

has also suggested a new method of teaching that contains five learning units

for the comprehension and mastery of Arabic poetry and literature.

To make this a more comprehensive approach, a number of approaches

to teaching have been proposed to provide a more interesting teaching and

learning milieu not only for students but also to teachers, enabling them to be

applied for self- study or in a classroom setting.