Course Levels

Course Levels

Students are placed into levels according to the placement test results. More information about the placement test is provided in the section about the placement test. The levels are as follows:

Level		Hours
1	Low Beginner	80 hours
2	Mid Beginner	80 hours
3	High Beginner	80 hours
4	Pre-Intermediate	80 hours
5	Mid-Intermediate	80 hours
6	Upper-Intermediate	80 hours
7	Advanced -1-	90 hours
8	Advanced -2-	90 hours

Stage Beginner

This stage consists of three levels: Beginner Low, Beginner Intermediate and Beginner High, each of 80 instruction hours. The distribution of the instruction hours that cover each linguistic skill differs from level to another depending on the each level’s objectives. Most of the instruction at the beginner level is directed towards learning the language through reading, grammar, and listening. Students advance to the next level after acquiring the basic principles of each level.

Beginner Low:

Depends on building up basic language skills in companion
Focuses on communicative form of instruction: Student can introduce her/ himself, can express her/his daily needs using simple words and sentences, understands proper gender usage to a certain degree,
Understands the usage of basic verbs and nouns such as the date, food, clothes and nature.
Enrich beginner students with vocabulary about home, family, food, drinks.
Grammar focuses on singular pronouns, past, present, present and imperative tenses.
Prepositions and question tools

Beginner:

Student is able to express needs within typical daily settings such as the market, street, university and restaurant.
Communicate with others about simple issues concerning daily life, ask and answer questions properly.
Construct grammatically correct sentences
Grammar focus on prepositions, مثنى conjunctions, plural, nominal and verbal sentences.

Beginner High:

Student moves to a larger field of acquainting the culture society around by using language in semi-familiar formal and informal situations like: apologize, hobbies, traditions in festivities, proverbs... etc)
Is able to describe things, people, and events in all tenses, narrate a complete story, understand instructions, giving opinion.
Is progressed in creating language to a paragraph level.
Grammar deals with negation, introductory to morphology forms, ableism…..

2 – Stage Intermediate

This stage consists of three levels: Intermediate Low, Intermediate and Intermediate High. There are 80 hours of instruction in each level.

Intermediate Low:

Student begins at this level to conduct dialogues on simple non-personal information, upgrading from the stage of dealing with perceptible information to the minimum level of abstraction
Texts studied vary from historical to social and cultural to recognize the important aspects of Arab culture, especially the Syrian.
Grammar: the different cases of nominal and verbal sentence, the five verbs, roots of above-triple verbs, derivatives and addendum.

Mid Intermediate:

Developing student's ability to dialogue in a variety of issues, and to compose correct sentences grammatical and structurally using linking tools and punctuation.
Enriching student’s knowledge of Arab culture through audio-visual media texts. Fields like history, culture, literature and poetry are included in the texts of this level.
Grammar covers issues like: rules of number, passive voice, types of accusatives.

High Intermediate:

Topics selected to promote students knowledge and language serving the aim of achieving the linguistic function sought for this level such as: description, expressing opinion, and upgrading student’s language to the level of discourse in writing and speaking as well as enhancing spontaneous language.
Student is provided original media texts to study, in addition to social, political and economic issues.
Grammar: tools of condition, the five nouns, manner of assertion, substitution, adverbs, and non-derivatives.

Stage Three: Program of Arabic Language Studies for Advanced

This level contains two levels each containing 90 hours of instruction.

First Advanced:

Focus on student's ability to deal with different texts in politics, economics, and sociology, history, general culture, in addition to the techniques that help to understand structures and phrases examined.
Special focus on writing in a variety of issues to solidify the writing skill and ability of expression. Student should submit a paper of study of 1500 words of a subjected of his/her choice at the end of the course.
Student starts at this level dealing with long texts, such as novel and specialized books.
At this level, students is expected to produce oral and written language at the level of coherent paragraph, properly using linking words, have command in Arabic writing style.

Second Advanced :

Enhance the student's ability to deal with the advanced texts of various fields.
Requires writing a research 1500-1800 word at the end of the course, which should be produced as an integrable objective unit: demonstrating, agreeing with opinions and disagreeing supported by logical arguments, using correct and proper language.
Subjects include Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern, in addition to texts in politics, economics, philosophy and sociology.

Curriculum

ALTD’s curriculum consists of a group of selected texts and methodologies that help students to achieve the objectives of each level. The ALTD’s methodologies come from both the experience of its own staff, as well as from linguistic research pertaining to the teaching of Arabic as a second language.