Penggunaan huruf Ya’ dalam sintaksis bahasa arab dalam kalangan pelajar Madrasah Alsagoff Al-Arabiah, Singapura

Abstract

) is one of the basic letters in the Arabic language serving multiple functions. However, many students understand only one of its roles, that is as a ضمير (pronoun) attributing it to أنا( ) which means ‘I’. The objective of this study is to determine the level of the students’ skills in distinguishing the various functions of Yā’, to identify the appropriate usage of Yā’ in a sentence structure as well as to analyse the students’ ability to relate Yā’s function to i’rab. A qualitative method was applied in this study using the instrument of unstructured interviews based on written tests of eight students from Alsagoff Arab School, ranging from primary five to secondary three. Data collected was processed manually guided by a theoretical framework of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (2001). Results showed that the respondents lack the skills to differentiate the diverse roles of letter Yā’ syntactically. This forced them to include other elements such as morphology, semantics and logics of the sentence structure to help them understand the functions of the letter. Next, findings also showed that the respondents faced difficulties in applying the functions of the letter Yā in a sentence structure as most of them are only at the stages of ‘remembering’ and ‘understanding’. The study also found that low cognitive levels of the students caused them to be incompetent at relating previously learned topics to the current ones. Thus, it was difficult for them to assess and explain whether the letter Yā is part of the word itself or is separated, functioning as the pronoun ‘I’ which means ‘أنا ’. Finally, the study shows that the respondents’ proficiency to relate Yā’s function to i’rab could only be achieved if they could master the process of ‘analysing’. At this stage they would then be able to distinguish, determine and correlate the diverse functions of letter Yā.’ At the end of the study, a learning model of the letter Yā was produced, with the aim to facilitate usage, enhance understanding and avoid confusion on the usage of letter Yā.