Constructivist Learning: Learning about Family in Arabic

Lina Mousa, Western High School

As a high school Arabic teacher, Lina primarily taught Arabic using 80% of the target language, as this was how she was taught in her own schooling. Through Project LEARN, Lina learned new practices and pedagogies to leverage students' full linguistic repertoires in the classroom. Students were encouraged to write and speak in languages other than Arabic to help them make sense of their learning.

Describing Your Family

In this unit, students learned new Arabic vocabulary words and phrases to describe different family members. This unit included two core projects: a family tree and a family photo album. For each project, students leveraged their ful linguistic repertoires to introduce and describe each of their family members.

Below, you will find some of Lina's instructional slides for this unit. These slides include images and descriptions of her own family members, which Lina used to introduce students to core vocabulary about family in this unit.

Arabic Family Presentation Slides

Family Trees

For the first project in this unit, students created a family tree introducing each of their family members using their full linguistic repertoires. Students were allowed to design their trees however they wished. In the examples here, students used Arabic, as well as other languages such as Spanish and Tagalog to create their trees and identify each of their family members.

Family Photo Album

In this final project, students created a photo album showcasing 8 family members, including cousins, aunts, and uncles from both sides of the family, with a paragraph about each person. While they did not have to use photos of their family members, students did have to provide information, such as each person's name, age, where they are from, where they live, their favorite foods, and their least favorite foods. All of these prompts built on previous learning and vocabulary from class, and a rubric was used to evaluate students' projects .

Students were able to utilize their full linguistic repertoires to create their photo albums, and, as seen in the examples here, many opted to complete their projects in Arabic and another language of their choosing. In each example, students provided a detailed description of each family members, thus meeting or exceeding the expectations for the project.

Project LEARN - Assessment - Family photo album presentation -Arabic 1..docx.pdf

Final Project Instructions and Rubric

Student Examples

After creating their project, students presented them to the class using multiple languages. Through this project, Lina noticed that students were engaged and worked diligently to find the required information about each family member. As students asked their family members for help with their projects, it opened up a new opportunity for them to view their family members as knowledge holders and producers, and provided them with quality time with their families. Lina also expressed that while students could understand and speak their home languages, many of them could not write in them; as a result, this project provided an additional opportunity for students to write core vocabulary in both Arabic and their home languages.

Example A: Arabic & Spanish

Example B: Arabic & Urdu

Example C: Arabic & Spanish

Beyond the Classroom

“[Through this project] I noticed that the students worked harder and more engaged to find out different information to use in their projects. Some students started texting their parents and asking about their family tree, family members names, ages, where they live and they were interested to know more about them. Also, it is interesting to find out that a lot of students understand and can speak their native languages but they do not know how to write it. They engaged in a learning process on how to write some vocabularies in other languages. Some of them used google translate and others asked some help from their peers in class, and others sat down with their parents to teach them and communicate with them to spend some quality time with them too.”

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