The Instructor

My name is Abdelkarim. I was born in Avignon, located in the south of France.

Passionate about education and the Arabic language, I’ve committed myself professionally and personally to this field for more than 15 years.

I did not learn the Arabic language; I was born into it. I acquired it in a natural way just like any child learning French or English in a family setting. Very early on, my parents passed down their love for the Arabic language to me.

As a native Arabic speaker, I spent the majority of my life developing the best ways of teaching and learning the Arabic language. I’ve always believed in total immersion instead of the traditional teaching methods of the Arabic language that unfortunately do not yield any results.
In order to learn Arabic, you must listen, listen, listen... then speak, speak, speak!

In 2006, Mouadh, my oldest child, came into the world. Then in 2007 Safiya joined him. As a parent who is passionate about the Arabic language, I whole-heartedly wanted them to learn Modern Standard Arabic but I didn’t know how to go about it. Besides speaking to them in an Arabic dialect and putting on cartoons for them in Modern Standard Arabic, I didn’t know of any other way to enhance their level of Arabic! Additionally, I didn’t want them to take the traditional classes that were given by the associations in my city.
I had understood that the method of teaching them to read and write without comprehension wasn’t effective and would lead nowhere. Not to mention the fact that the desire to learn Arabic was not aroused at all in the children.

Everything changed in 2009, the day I participated in an Arabic language teacher training course in Marseille provided by Arabic for All, a Saudi institute based in Riyad specialising in the teaching of the Arabic language, one of whose speakers was one of the authors of the famous programme “Alarabiya Bayna Yadayk”.

It is a training that will completely consolidate me in my vision of teaching the Arabic language and that will make me discover a revolutionary method that will change my professional and personal projects.

It is a method of acquiring the Arabic language through immersion and interaction from the famous Palestinian linguist Professor Abdellah Dannan, to whom, in 2015, was awarded the prize for the best teaching method of the Arabic language in a school setting.

It’s a method that is based on a communicative approach to the Arabic language based on listening and interaction.

Thanks to this method, my 5 children are completely Arabic speaking in addition to being French-speaking and fluent in the Moroccan dialect. Today, I communicate with them exclusively in Modern Standard Arabic from an early age.

Today, I am the pedagogical manager of the Shatibi Atfal centre in Garges-lès-Gonesse which hosts Arabic immersion sessions for children in the Paris region. (Find out more)

The Arabic Immersion method is also based on my 10 years of experience as a language trainer as well as my Master’s degree in Didactics of Teaching the Arabic language.