STAr : Story telling for Arabic language

Arabic Language is the language of the Holy Quran. The language is familiar and crucial to all Muslims world wide and Muslims are highly recommended to understand the language of the holy Quran to ease them when reciting the Quran. The Minister of Education has started introducing Arabic language to Muslim´s primary school children since 2005 under the JQAF program. However, the implementation of most of the foreign language classes are not really successful as those subjects were taught with little or no regards with the current field-tested paradigm of foreign language acquisition. Many teachers are using almost outdated paradigms of learning for their students. This situation is unproductive for a fast growing learner who wants to acquire knowledge. Therefore, this project is conducted to assist the Malaysian Muslim children to understand the Arabic language better as it is part of the JQAF syllabus. This courseware is specially developed to accompany the primary school Arabic language text book and its scope is to ensure that students know how to manipulate the Arabic words according to its gender. Prior to the development stage of this project, a study towards a suitable instructional design strategies of teaching and learning Arabic language grammar especially in differentiating the masculine and feminine words is conducted. As a result, the storytelling approach has been adapted. Storytelling helps stimulates the children´s cognitive skills in recognizing and remembering the words according to its gender. The multimedia elements such as graphic, animation, and audio are fully utilized in this application to create an interesting way of learning and thus gain the students attention. An alpha testing towards the STAr courseware has been conducted to five respondents who are the Year one students. The results shown that 60% of the respondents managed to score 85% marks and above while 40% of the respondents scored at least 67 in the exercise module which inclu- - ded in the STAr courseware. This courseware design can be commercialized and used for developing other courseware to teach other foreign language such as France and German language.