--- title: "Using the Book \"Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum\" in — Zakiya 2024" description: "This is a qualitative classroom study, not an NLP paper." authors: ["Fina Hida Zakiya", "Baiq Widia Nita Kasih", "Wirawan Jamhuri"] year: 2024 venue: "Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching 1" source: "https://ejournal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jallt/article/view/146" doi: "10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146" licence: "CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zakiya-2024-using-book-al-miftah-lil/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zakiya-2024-using-book-al-miftah-lil/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/5/) / Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles # Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles **Authors:** Fina Hida Zakiya, Baiq Widia Nita Kasih, Wirawan Jamhuri · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching 1 · **Licence:** [CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146) · [PDF](https://ejournal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/jallt/article/download/146/43) · [DOI 10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146](https://doi.org/10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4391483151) **Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary This is a qualitative classroom study, not an NLP paper. It examines how Darul Falah International School, an Islamic boarding school in Bagon, Mataram (Indonesia), teaches Nahwu (Arabic syntax) with "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum." The book is an Indonesian-language, four-volume primer from the Sidogiri boarding school, designed to make reading classical Arabic texts quicker for beginners. Data came from observation, interviews and documents collected in the 2022/2023 school year, and were analysed through reduction, display and verification. Lessons follow a pre-lesson, core and closing structure. The core runs as an inductive cycle: a text, comprehension questions, reading aloud, worked examples, deriving the rule from the text, then exercises. The authors list obstacles on both sides: - **Students:** trouble reading script on the board, volume-specific grammatical hurdles, boredom, and lessons lost when the teacher is absent. - **Teachers:** latecomers, students without books, no revision in the dormitory, difficulty gauging real ability, classroom management, and motivating learners. The study matters as a practical record of where a graded grammar curriculum breaks down. ## Key points - **Programme and source:** The school started its Al-Miftah programme in 2018, after some of its people trained as teachers at Sidogiri (Pasuruan). The book was written by Qusyairi Ismail in 2011. - **Daily routine:** The day opens with one hour of "Lalaran," chanting verb conjugation (taṣrīf) and reciting the Qur'an. Hours two to five are then given to Al-Miftah lessons. - **Volume content:** - Volume 1: basic units such as sentences, words, verb forms and nouns. - Volume 2: adjectives, gender and number. - Volume 3: harder morphology, such as maqṣūr, mazīd and mabnī forms. - Volume 4: full iʿrāb reading, plurals and words with irregular readings. - **Supporting material:** Songs drawn from Alfiyya Ibn Malik and Naẓm al-Jurumiyya reinforce the content. - **Where students struggle by volume:** - Volume 1: changing a word into a target pattern, such as dual or plural. - Volume 2: telling look-alike categories apart. - Volume 3: deciding a verb's form or number, and whether it is regular. - Volume 4: following the context of complex sentences. - **Background matters:** Students without prior madrasah diniyah or Qur'an-kindergarten schooling had the most trouble reading the board. ## Interesting ideas - The rule is never given first: learners meet a real text, answer questions, read it aloud, and only then extract the grammatical rule before practising it. Abstracting a rule from attested examples tends to stick better than a top-down statement. — For Mova (learn): Self-induced repair rules could follow the same order, starting from clusters of concrete parse errors, abstracting a candidate rule, then checking it on fresh exercises before adoption. - The curriculum moves from word classes, to agreement features, to irregular morphology, to full case-reading of complex sentences, and the hardest failures appear only at the final, context-dependent stage. A staged curriculum like this shows exactly where competence breaks. — For Mova (answer): School-course tests could be organised in the same graded tiers, so a failure is located at the first stage where the reader breaks down rather than reported as one overall score. - Asked as a group whether they understood, children stayed silent or chimed in agreement, but questioning them one by one showed many could not answer. Aggregate self-reported confidence hides individual gaps. — For Mova (learn): Evaluation should probe each item individually and include negative controls, rather than trusting averaged confidence or a model's own claim that a case is handled. - Students struggled to fix a word's grammatical state or ending until they grasped the surrounding sentence, so morphology alone was not enough in the advanced volumes. Ending decisions depend on structure, not just the word form. — For Mova (tree): Where feature assignment is ambiguous, morphological choices could be revisited after parsing, letting the dependency relation decide instead of a context-free tagger guess. - Daily chanted drilling of conjugation paradigms (Lalaran) keeps the full inflection tables fresh as a routine warm-up. A small, always-run paradigm check catches basic regressions cheaply. — For Mova (tokens): Complete English inflection paradigms could run as a quick regression suite before each training or release, flagging any lemma or morphology drift. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @article{zakiya2024using, title = {{Using the Book "Al-Miftah lil-‘Ulum" in Teaching Arabic Grammar at the Islamic Boarding School in Indonesia: Benefits and Obstacles}}, author = {Zakiya, Fina Hida and Kasih, Baiq Widia Nita and Jamhuri, Wirawan}, journal = {Journal of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching 1}, year = {2024}, doi = {10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146}, url = {https://doi.org/10.23971/jallt.v1i2.146} } ``` - [← previous Unifying the Scope of Bridging Anaphora Types in English: Bridging Annotations in ARRAU and GUM](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/levine-2024-unifying-scope-bridging-anaphora-types/) - [next → Verbal strategies for expressing reciprocity – the case of Hebrew](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2024-siegal-verbal-strategies-expressing-reciprocity-case/) - [↑ back to papers of 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2024/page/5/) ## References 21 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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