Book Review: Bulbul by Mr. Antoine Khoury

I read with great interest Bulbul, the very original manual of Arabic learning written by Antoine Khoury from the University of Windsor.

Professor Khoury combines two very important qualities that qualify him to write such an interesting and efficient manual: he has theoretical pedagogical knowledge and experience in second language teaching, specifically in French and Arabic, two of the most important languages in the world. Since he teaches two very different languages belonging to two totally different families of languages – Semitic and Indo-European – he is very aware of the universal psychological processes at work in the acquisition of a language, such as the importance of motivation and of inference of meaning, rules, structures and pronunciation.
The motivation to learn what he teaches is achieved by the typical Lebanese sense of humour with which the pedagogical material is presented. The dialogues are funny and authentic; the learners feel that they are being introduced to a specific mentality and culture while acquiring a new language. Wanting to know more about these culture and mentality, they make the effort to understand the dialogues which constitute the text, and by doing so, they become motivated to acquire the language taught. The psychological process of learning is achieved by the authentic dialogues. This process combines behaviorist and cognitive principles: the learners deduce rules and meaning from the dialogues in the same way that a child learns his/her mother tongue; since they are adults, they are capable of generalizing with the help of the instructor. The acquisition of the pronunciation of Arabic is very difficult for speakers of European languages because several phonemes in this language, specifically some belonging to the guttural paradigm, are not found in the European languages. This part of the acquisition process is taken care of by the videos that accompany the written text.

I am sure that “ Bulbul” will not only help students of Arabic to acquire this language but will also become a teaching and learning model for teachers and students of other languages.

Dr. Moshé Starets, Professor Emeritus, French and Applied Linguistics
Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Windsor,
Windsor, Ontario, Canada

December 01 2008