Learning Qur'anic Arabic through interactive web-based software: A pragmatic approach in Language for Specific Purpose

About 80 percent of the world's Muslim populations are non-native speakers of the Arabic language. Since it is obligatory for all Muslims to recite the Qur'an in Arabic during regular prayers, an extraordinary social phenomenon has taken place in some parts of the Muslim world: in schools, children are only taught the complex phonological rules of the Arabic language in the context of the Qur'an. This has given rise to a demographic segment of adult learners who are interested in a Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) curriculum that would help them learn a closed set of syntactic rules and vocabularies in the context of the Qur'an, so that they can recall an idiomatic translation in their native language while they recite or listen to the Qur'an. Little research work exists on the user modeling and needs analysis for this purpose. In this paper, the design and initial prototype of a ubiquitous web-based language learning software founded on the LSP principles is presented and some initial results of need analysis of the user data are shared. The preliminary results of this study indicate the potential of this approach and highlight the areas where improvement is required.