Pedagogy as bountiful giving: L2 Arabic for adult learners beyond formal education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the nature of Arabic as a second language (L2) pedagogy in the context of language beyond the formal curriculum. Although such non-curricular teaching of Arabic in offline and online settings is available in many countries including Australia, Canada, UK and USA, it has not received much research attention. The present pedagogical inquiry is based on a free Arabic class for Muslim adults in a major Australian city which is taught by an autodidactic teacher who is an IT professional and attended by students who are also professionals or academics or PhD researchers. Based on data from class observation and teaching recordings and teacher interviews, I describe multiple creative features of the pedagogy that support its theorizing as a holistic, passionate and generous act of giving. The teacher’s teaching practice demonstrates what an Islamically informed and inspired pedagogy looks like, how it manifests in practice, and what potential outcomes it may have in the context of language beyond the formal setting. Emerging from the classroom-based research is a hybrid pedagogical mode that combines the spiritual and the secular, the physical and the technological/virtual, and the Western and the Eastern traditions in teaching and learning engagement. The gift pedagogy builds the class as a community and promotes participant wellbeing and identity reinforcement. As language teaching and learning increasingly take place outside formal, mainstream and fee-paying contexts, this research can enrich readers’ understanding of L2 pedagogy in changing contexts and times.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".