Written and Spoken Arabic in Syria: towards the development of teaching Arabic as a foreign language at the Higher Language Institute of Damascus

International audienceStandard Arabic is actually the language of writing in Damascus. The speeches made in the media and in some TV series are, in most cases, a literal restatement of visual coding of the language (text written in standard Arabic) in auditory coding (reading aloud the written text). Similarly, everyday Arabic does not have the same coding as Arabic that exists in the media, in books and in Arabic language courses. This gives the impression that the current teaching content is not suitable for a usage outside of the language classroom. This paper deals with the problem of building the lexical content of textbooks of teaching Arabic as a foreign language of The Higher Language Institute of Damascus (Syria). A content that does not withdraw from standard norms (focus on the adaptation of a classic or modern standard Arabic), but seeks to be as close as possible to the daily practice of language that is very rich in dialect. We study the spoken language in Syria represented in 30 Syrian TV videos. The study proves that about 60% of its lexical components belongs to standard Arabic. This analysis focuses on finding the crossing points in standard and spoken Arabic to build a route map that allows the learner an easy passage from what he or she learns in the Arabic language classroom to an Arabic that is really practiced in everyday communications. It provides some solutions to reduce the gap between these two usages of Arabic