ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic that spreaded around the world in March 2020 has changed the nation's education landscape. Standard Operating Procedures that demand presence at respective residences have made online learning one of the best platforms that replace face-to-face learning in educational institutions across the country. Thus, this study aims to propose an effective online language learning strategy to be a reference for educators and students to master language skills using post-Covid19 educational technology. This research employs quantitative methods cross sectional studies supported by qualitative data. The research instruments is questionnaires. A total of 280 respondents consisting of university students in the Arabic field at Malaysian universities answered the questionnaire. The results showed that the respondents know how to learn through online learning with a mean rate of 4.24 and the respondents agreed that the instructions given during online learning should be clear with a highest mean rate of 4.46. Among the online learning strategies used by students are always sharing opinions during online learning, responding using chat rooms to engage in discussions and making notes to improve understanding. Respondents are also satisfied with online learning platforms such as google meet, Webex and zoom © 2023, International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies.All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
The world has been affected by the Covid-19 epidemic during the last three years. During that period, most people tended to use social networks, where by searching for topics related to Covid-19, information could be provided to manage decisions by organizations or governments about public health. With the importance of the Arabic language, despite the lack of research targeting it, using Arabic language as a source of data and analyzing it due to the large number of users on social networks gives an impetus to understand people's feelings about the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the challenges facing sentiment analysis in Arabic is the use of dialects. The most common and existing methods used have been quite ineffective as they are oblivious to contextual information and cannot handle long-distance word dependencies. The Iraqi Arabic dialect is one of the Arabic dialects that still suffers from a lack of research in sentiment analysis. In this study, the official page of the Iraqi Ministry of Health on Facebook was used to collect and analysis comments. Word2vec model is incorporated to extract words semantic characteristics. To capture contextual features, Stacked Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory model (Stacked Bi-LSTM) utilizes sequential word vectors derived from the Continuous Bag of Words model. When compared to most common and existing approaches, the proposed method performed well. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
During pandemics, health discourse cannot be separated from media discourse, which usually exercises its power to deliver particular ideological and political perspectives through the content it presents. This study aimed to investigate the coverage of the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan in local and nonlocal Arabic news outlets. It shed light on the potential ideologies reflected in the news headlines and articles. To achieve the objectives of the study, eight local and fourteen nonlocal news articles tackling the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan on the 2nd and 3rd of March 2020 were collected and analyzed in light of Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach. The results showed that the nonlocal news headlines and articles included words with negative connotations that may create resentment and spread panic among citizens. On the other hand, in local news outlets, reassuring phrases were used by focusing on the government's procedures and distancing Jordan from the country where the virus widely spread, namely, Italy.
ABSTRACT
The study compares the effectiveness, popularity, and ease of applicability of different learning tools in virtual classrooms among university teachers and students concerning the users' technological literacy and training, as well as equipment support offered by the universities during the pandemic. Comparisons between face-to-face teaching in classrooms and online virtual classrooms will be drawn concerning limitations, incentives, motivation, and effectiveness toward learning. This study also leads to the question of future course development by exploring the possibility of course design and assessment restructuring with a switch to online education with the new mode of technology as the trend.
ABSTRACT
The learning of Arabic in Malaysia, which was once exclusive for Muslim students, is now gaining popularity among local non-Muslims. Learning Arabic, even at the beginner's level, is not easy for non-Muslim students. The situation is even more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic which witnessed a total shift to the online teaching and learning mode. The aim of this study is to identify the learning techniques employed by non-Muslim students to learn Arabic speaking skills online. This qualitative study interviewed six non-Muslim undergraduate students from Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) who were taking a level 2 Arabic course. The results of shows that non -Muslim students were able to follow the process of learning speaking skills online, even though they had some difficulties at the beginning due to the lack of basics in Arabic. Their ability to follow the learning process were mainly the result of mastering the basic skills of reading Arabic texts and writing Arabic letters. Equipped with these two skills, the students demonstrated 22 learning techniques which can be divided into three categories according to their intended use, namely Malay-Arabic translation, reading Arabic texts without diacritical marks, and Arabic speech improvement. This study also suggests that fiurther research should be carried out to explore the potential of Asynchronous Multimedia-based Oral Communication (AMOC) in Arabic language learning for beginners.
ABSTRACT
Technology, which has been believed to ease and maximize a learning process, has resulted in demotivation among AFL (Arabic as a Foreign Language) students with online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current research aims to map out the forms of demotivation among AFL students, analyze the factors, and show the implications on student learning outcomes. It employs a qualitative method with a narrative approach that relies on the results of interviews with students and data from student evaluations. The finding reveals that the lack of student participation indicates demotivation among AFL students during the learning process. Four factors were affecting the downturn: infrastructure, structure, partner, and teacher. This study suggests further studies to discover ways to deal with demotivation so that they are more enthusiastic about online learning.
ABSTRACT
One of the efforts that can be carried out to systematically disseminate gender values is through teaching, be it through the teaching materials or the teaching techniques or strategies. One of the methods observed was through the teaching of Arabic language at Madina Islamic Full Day Elementary School in Slawi Tegal. The research methodology conducted in this study was the descriptive analysis method. The data collection techniques used included observations, interviews, and documentation study. Results of the research indicate that the teaching materials, used by the school from grade one to grade six, show values of gender equality, starting with the appearance of the book cover, the texts of the Arabic language teaching materials, and the exercise materials in the book. Furthermore, based on results of in-depth interviews, it was clarified that gender values in the books are complemented by verbal elaborations given informally by the teachers. Non-verbal explanations are also required in the form of appreciative attitude and treatment given by the educators to the learners, both boys and girls in an equal manner. In relation to the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Arabic language lessons were taught online.
ABSTRACT
Misinformation and misleading actions have appeared as soon as COVID-19 vaccinations campaigns were launched, no matter what the country's alphabetization level or growing index is. In such a situation, supervised machine learning techniques for classification appears as a suitable solution to model the value & veracity of data, especially in the Arabic language as a language used by millions of people around the world. To achieve this task, we had to collect data manually from SM platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Arabic news websites. This paper aims to classify Arabic language news into fake news and real news, by creating a Machine Learning (ML) model that will detect Arabic fake news (DAFN) about COVID-19 vaccination. To achieve our goal, we will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which is especially challenging since NLP libraries support for Arabic is not common. We will use NLTK package of python to preprocess the data, and then we will use a ML model for the classification.
ABSTRACT
Due to their need to be connected to the rest of the world, people started to use social networks extensively to share their feelings and be informed, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdown. The tremendous growth of content in social media increased the frequency of researchers' work on natural language understanding, text classification, and information retrieval. Unfortunately, not all languages have benefited equally from this interest. Arabic is an example of such languages. The main reason behind this gap is the limited number of datasets that addressed Covid-19-related topics. To this aim, we performed the first-of-its-kind systematic review that covered, to the best of our knowledge, the most Arabic Covid-19 datasets freely available or access granted upon request. This paper presents these 15 datasets alongside their features and the type of analysis conducted. The general concern of the authors is to direct researchers to reliable and freely available datasets that advance the progress of Arabic Covid-19-related studies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
PurposeThis study aims to focus on how online presentations have a positive effect on the anxiety of the students, especially students who are introverted by nature and always suffer from anxiety and stress while performing face-to-face presentations in the classrooms, which negatively affect students' performance and, thereby grade.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted a quantitative research design to obtain a broader perspective. An online questionnaire, developed using Google Forms, was accessed by 239 female undergraduate students from Level 1 to 8 of the English Department at the College of Languages and Translation in King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire consisted of 15 closed Likert-type questions. The Arabic translation of the questions was included in the questionnaire to make the participants more comfortable answering the questions as all the participants' L1 is Arabic.FindingsWith the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, COVID-19 became a global health issue and significantly impacted education worldwide. With this, a digital transformation took place, resulting in a total e-learning distance education system. This type of technology enhanced distance learning approach had to be adopted as social and physical contacts were limited globally to mitigate the transmissions of the virus. Accordingly, all lectures, learning activities, tests and other forms of evaluation were conducted via distance e-learning. When oral presentations were conducted online, a new reality emerged in this changed situation. This study sought to prove that online oral presentations positively reduce introvert EFL learners' anxiety and stress.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was conducted using a small number of samples;thus, to gain substantial insight, future research could be conducted with a greater number of samples from diverse demographic backgrounds. Teachers' perceptions of online oral presentations could also be considered in future studies since education consolidates between learners and teachers. In addition, as this research explored English language major students only, further comparative studies can be conducted including students from other disciplines, which may lead to new insights and issues related to online presentations. This study used a questionnaire as a data collection instrument. It is recommended to use qualitative tools such as interviews, focus group meetings, journals and student diaries in future studies so that more information about in-person presentation anxiety can be discovered.Originality/valueParticipants' opinions, procured through the questionnaire of this study, can bring new insights for educators and policymakers to incorporate online presentations as one of the mainstream assessment methods for tertiary-level courses.
ABSTRACT
Due to their need to be connected to the rest of the world, people started to use social networks extensively to share their feelings and be informed, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdown. The tremendous growth of content in social media increased the frequency of researchers' work on natural language understanding, text classification, and information retrieval. Unfortunately, not all languages have benefited equally from this interest. Arabic is an example of such languages. The main reason behind this gap is the limited number of datasets that addressed Covid-19-related topics. To this aim, we performed the first-of-its-kind systematic review that covered, to the best of our knowledge, the most Arabic Covid-19 datasets freely available or access granted upon request. This paper presents these 15 datasets alongside their features and the type of analysis conducted. The general concern of the authors is to direct researchers to reliable and freely available datasets that advance the progress of Arabic Covid-19-related studies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
It is difficult to maintain social distancing in highly populated areas where people live in proximity. This study aimed to qualitatively explore experiences of COVID-19 recovered patients residing in one such area. We employed semi-structured face-to-face interviews. An interview guide was developed, validated, piloted, and minor changes were made. People living in this area, above 18 years of age, and recovered from COVID-19 were approached for the interviews, 11 of them were recruited to be interviewed, and their verbal informed consent was audio recorded. The interviews were conducted in the Arabic language in a semi-private area of the community center, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed later. Thematic analysis generated 30 subthemes, which were categorized into seven overarching themes: information about COVID-19;life during COVID-19 illness;spreading of COVID-19;precautionary measures;interventions that helped in recovery;impact of COVID-19 on life;support received during COVID-19 illness. Experiences of people from the hotspot who had recovered from COVID-19 highlighted what life had been like in the hotspot under lockdown, especially with having been afflicted with the infection, factors that facilitated their recovery, and the way their lives were and have been affected due to COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
In the COVID-19 outbreak, the implementation of learning which is usually carried out face-to-face has been shifted to virtual form. The performance of education during the pandemic has undergone significant changes so that the problems found in its implementation can be studied to find solutions to these problems. This study was conducted to obtain data on the performance and progress of Arabic language learning in Islamic boarding schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative through library research. The study was conducted to provide a clear, objective, systematic, analytical, and critical description of the implementation of Arabic language learning at Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Tanah Datar during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research was conducted in 2021 in one of the Ibtidaiyah Madrasah in Tanah Datar Regency. The research results are sourced from several instruments that have been prepared previously, such as questionnaires or research questionnaires to serve as a supporting tool in conducting direct observations and interviews with the research object. In addition, the data of this study were sourced from the results of interviews with the Ibtidaiyah madrasah. His study results indicate that learning Arabic during the pandemic has advantages and disadvantages. The obstacles found in the implementation of learning can be in the form of the psychological conditions of students affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, less than optimal teacher performance in preparing lessons, internal family problems, and the environmental conditions of the surrounding community.
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Purpose Among the main factors required to achieve standard quality in learning foreign languages including Arabic, standardized language test and continuous evaluation are the prerequisites. Such a test and evaluation should be carried out in a planned, gradual, and continuous manner with the aim to get a clear description of the learning development of students as a result of their learning activities. This paper aimed to evaluate the Arabic language learning program at three State Islamic Universities in Indonesia during the COVID-19 period. Method This research adopted a field research method, using a qualitative approach. The samples of the study were the State Islamic University of Lampung, the State Islamic University of Malang and the State Islamic University of Makassar. These three universities were sampled from a total of 35 Islamic universities in Indonesia, and each represented West, East and Central Indonesia. Data collection techniques included interviews and documentation search. Data analysis used the condensation, data presentation and conclusion verification method recommended by model of Miles, Huberman & Saldana (2018). Findings The results of this study indicates that the three sampled State Islamic Universities did not have any significant differences in evaluation in terms of monitoring, midterm and final exams as well as tutor supervision. However, one difference was seen in the assessment process in the form of a portfolio at the State Islamic University of Malang, which used methods like memorizing and translating text from Indonesian to Arabic. Implications to Research and Practice The findings highlight the similarities in the evaluation process of the three State Islamic Universities, the rewards and punishments systems, and the appreciation and punishment awarded to tutors. The selection of learning methods and providing opportunities for practice would also be a useful reference to predict student achievement. © 2022 Ani Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
In light of the global crisis like COVID-19, many people are afraid to leave the house and visit the doctor for fear of these epidemics. On the other side, the amazing development of artificial intelligence has led to chatbots' emergence and use in several fields. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to build an automated chatbot system that interacts with people in the Arabic Algerian dialect and helps patients ask general medical questions. To achieve this purpose, we propose three sequence-to-sequence models based on three Recurrent Neural Networks encoder-decoders: Long Short-Term Memory, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, and Gated Recurrent Unit, to understand the user's request and provide the right useful answer. Experimentally, we have collected medical data of 2150 pairs. The results were very promising, and the proposed chatbot performed excellently in handling user questions. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The learning of Arabic in Malaysia, which was once exclusive for Muslim students, is now gaining popularity among local non-Muslims. Learning Arabic, even at the beginner’s level, is not easy for non-Muslim students. The situation is even more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic which witnessed a total shift to the online teaching and learning mode. The aim of this study is to identify the learning techniques employed by non-Muslim students to learn Arabic speaking skills online. This qualitative study interviewed six non-Muslim undergraduate students from Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) who were taking a level 2 Arabic course. The results of shows that non-Muslim students were able to follow the process of learning speaking skills online, even though they had some difficulties at the beginning due to the lack of basics in Arabic. Their ability to follow the learning process were mainly the result of mastering the basic skills of reading Arabic texts and writing Arabic letters. Equipped with these two skills, the students demonstrated 22 learning techniques which can be divided into three categories according to their intended use, namely Malay-Arabic translation, reading Arabic texts without diacritical marks, and Arabic speech improvement. This study also suggests that fiurther research should be carried out to explore the potential of Asynchronous Multimedia-based Oral Communication (AMOC) in Arabic language learning for beginners. © 2022, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to adapt the survey questionnaire designed by Moens et al. (2021) and determine the validity and reliability of the Arabic version of the survey in a sample of the Saudi population experiencing teleworking. METHODS: The questionnaire includes 2 sections. The first consists of 13 items measuring the impact of extended telework during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. The second section includes 6 items measuring the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on self-view of telework and digital meetings. The survey instrument was translated based on the guidelines for the cultural adaptation of self-administrated measures. RESULTS: The reliability of the questionnaire responses was measured by Cronbach's alpha. The construct validity was checked through exploratory factor analysis followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to further assess the factor structure. CFA revealed that the model had excellent fit (root mean square error of approximation, 0.00; comparative fit index, 1.0; Tucker-Lewis index, 1; standardized root mean squared residual, 0.0). CONCLUSIONS: The Arabic version of the teleworking questionnaire had high reliability and good validity in assessing experiences and perceptions toward teleworking. While the validated survey examined perceptions and experiences during COVID-19, its use can be extended to capture experiences and perceptions during different crises.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the study was to indicate the challenges that Arabic language teachers face in using distance learning through the COVID 19. The study applied a descriptive approach, through using a survey instrument. The survey was applied to a stratified random sample, consisting of 348 participants including 182 male and 166 female teachers in the Hail region in Saudi Arabia The results showed that there are several challenges faced by teachers, most notably: poor internet connection, high financial cost of providing devices for learners, poor attendance and difficulty in developing skills that need direct interaction. In addition to the absence of statistically significant differences towards the study axes between the average responses of the study sample, according to the number of training courses in the technical field and years of experience. The study recommended spreading the culture of collective participation and active dialogue, using motivating teaching strategies, and developing a clear vision for teaching the Arabic language from a distance.
ABSTRACT
Natural Language Processing (NLP) can analyze and classify the growing number of expressed opinions and feelings of online texts and quickly get the required feedback. The technique of automatically labeling a textual document with the most appropriate collection of labels is known as text classification, whereas supervised text classifiers require extensive human expertise and labeling efforts. This paper seeks to build a multi-labeled Arabic dataset by labeling an Arabic Covid-19 Tweet to two groups based on their lexical features: related topic and associated sentiment. An extensive dataset was created from Twitter posts to achieve this purpose. There are over 32k multi-labeled tweets in the dataset. The dataset will be made freely available to the Arabic computational linguistics research community. This work used both traditional machine learning approaches and a deep-learning approach to investigate this dataset's performance. This paper demonstrates that traditional ML approaches provide higher accuracy with almost stable performance when experienced on the Twitter dataset for sentiment analysis and topic classification.
ABSTRACT
Mobile learning and its influence on improving learning outcomes are among the recent trends in education. This study investigates the factors impacting teachers’ intentions to use (and their usage of) the ‘I Read Arabic’ (IRA) digital platform for teaching literacy. By utilising the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) model, seven factors were explored in terms of their predictions of behavioural intention and actual use of the IRA digital platform. A determined sample size of 285 Arabic teachers teaching grades K–6 in Saudi Arabia participated in this study. A mixed-method approach, using a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, was conducted to collect data. Structural equation modelling and thematic analysis were used to analyse the data. The quantitative results indicated that hedonic motivation, habit, effort expectancy, performance expectancy, and price value were significant predictors of teachers’ behavioural intention to use the IRA digital platform for teaching literacy. Teachers’ usage of the IRA digital platform was shown to be significantly influenced by behavioural intention and facilitating conditions. The qualitative results yielded two main themes: the advantages and challenges of using the IRA digital platform. Several useful implications are suggested for teachers, school leaders, and education policy makers to sustain digital learning in Saudi Arabia’s post-pandemic educational system.