Abstract

Teaching a literary text for non-native speakers of Arabic is a challenging task since these texts are authentic and often not intended for teaching purposes. Yet literary texts can be taught when proper strategies are utilized by teachers of Arabic for non-native speakers. This study addresses some challenges encountered by both teachers and non-native learners of Arabic when a literary text is used as teaching material. It also proposes a number of strategies that render literary texts useful for teaching Arabic. A non-native speaker may find it hard to comprehend literary texts compared with other journalistic, press, historical, and economic texts. This is especially true of reading as a complex skill, even if it is classified as a receptive skill. Often, some terminologies may sound difficult to learners at the intermediate and advanced levels when they read a literary text. This, in turn, hinders the comprehension and overall understanding of that text. Therefore, this study traces the challenges that hinder understanding and comprehension among non-native speakers of Arabic when they are exposed to literary texts. Three components were tested, namely, brevity, metaphor, and deletion. The study intends to provide techniques for teaching literary texts based on three stages of reading: pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. These stages, this article argues, render a literary text approachable and readable by non-native speakers of Arabic. Teachers of non-native speakers of Arabic will, therefore, benefit from the development of the teaching methods suggested in the current study, which presents literary texts through a pedagogical approach that can be further analyzed through a descriptive-analytical approach.