Classical Arabic Literature: Exploring Arabic Through Song

The essential questions of this unit are "How does literature reveal the values of a language culture or a time period?" "How do music and lyrics form a shared vocabulary through which people communicate within and across cultures?" 

We envision this unit as an activity for the end of a school year or summer program, where students get to apply the vocabulary and linguistic structures they have learned throughout the course of study to a new context.  People have strong emotional associations with certain songs, and they are an effective shorthand form of communication, whether you are quoting a lyric in conversation or a filmmaker chooses to play a well-known song in a movie to express ideas and feelings that the characters’ dialogue does not express.  Everyone’s experience with music and lyrics is unique, but almost everyone has one.  (As a thought exercise, if English is not your first language, try to remember the first song in English where you understood the lyrics.  If Arabic is not your first language, try to remember the first song in Arabic where you understood the lyrics.)
Intermediate students of Arabic can probably understand only a few words in a song on the first try, but when contemplating the lyrics more closely, they will find many more familiar and semi-familiar words and structures.  By the end of the exercise, they will understand the lyrics enough to appreciate the song more than they did at first, if not to understand every word.
The goal of this lesson is to explore and share Arabic songs and students’ impressions of them.  We hope that you make “fill-in-the-blank activities” similar to the ones we have made (see the links in the “Resources” section below) for other songs that you think will be meaningful to your students, in addition to the ones we have made.  We have chosen four of these songs because they contain a substantial amount of vocabulary that will be familiar to students who have studied AlKitaab Part One and one of them because it is a Classical Arabic poem set to contemporary music.  We assumed that students have only studied Modern Standard Arabic, but this type of exercise has virtually endless possibilities for Arabic classes that use spoken dialects, since there are so many popular songs in the dialects from which you can choose.

Download Classical Arabic Literature : Exploring Arabic Through Song Unit Plan (.pdf)

This lesson plan was developed with support from a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the US Department of Education.