Abstract:

In this work, the authors try to formulate and substantiate a completely new problem, which the Russian teachers of the Arabic language of the RUDN University have faced recently. It concerns the difficulties of teaching Arabic script to Russian first-year students (the initial stage of training), the problem of training script skills. The relevance and seriousness of the stated topic is compounded by the fact that these problems are experienced by first-year students who have finished high school and successfully passed the final exams in the Russian (native) and foreign (usually English) languages, and, therefore, have already mastered two graphic systems based on Cyrillic and Latin.

The main goals and objectives of the study are to adequately describe the frequency errors, to determine their nature and possible causes, as well as to try to identify possible ways to overcome these difficulties. In accordance with the goals and objectives for identifying and describing script errors, there were used such general scientific methods as generalization, abstraction, formalization, analysis and synthesis.

From the total set of students’ script errors collected by teachers over the past 5 years, through the purposive sampling method there were selected the most demonstrable cases of errors for further in-depth and multilateral study.

As a result of the work, all students’ script errors were systematized and divided into the following subgroups:
- writing letters in violation of the rules of a particular handwriting,
- violations of writing letters of the same type,
- adding extra connecting elements.

According to the authors, these errors are usually caused by the mixing of letters in reading and writing by visual similarity, mixing of phonemes by acoustic-articulatory similarity (which in turn is caused by the violation of phonemic perception), insufficient formedness of pronunciation skills (more than half of the consonant sounds of the Arabic language are missing in the Indo-European languages).
The further analysis of the systematized errors based on the research materials of Russian and foreign specialists allowed assuming possible causes of problems in the field of formation of students’ script skills.

The work has shown that overcoming the difficulties in the formation of script skills is possible through the development of special types of exercises aimed at improving phonemic hearing and aural-oral skills, as well as students’ spatial perception of the letters image.

The conclusions made in the work are of great practical importance, since the quality of the formedness of script skills directly affects the further training of students’ competent command of the Arabic language.

Keywords:

Arabic, initial stage of training, script skills, letter-sound analysis, phoneme, grapheme.