Arabic for Religious Purposes A Curriculum Analysis at STAI Ali bin Abi Thalib Surabaya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53515/alqodiri.v24i3.272Keywords:
Arabic language curriculum, religious purposes, Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), distributed specific-purpose curriculum, constructive alignment, Islamic higher educationAbstract
Arabic in Islamic higher education is commonly expected to provide access to religious sources, but the presence of Islamic content does not necessarily show that a curriculum develops functional competence for religious tasks. This study analyzed how religious purposes are enacted across the Arabic language curriculum at STAI Ali bin Abi Thalib Surabaya. A qualitative single case study examined the 2021 Curriculum Handbook, 19 prescribed books or instructional sections across six course clusters, classroom observation notes for the six clusters, and semi-structured interviews with one program administrator, seven lecturers, and one fourth level student. Data were condensed, coded into seven thematic categories, compared in analytical matrices, and triangulated across documents, interviews, and observations. The findings show a vertically sequenced curriculum in which religious purposes are distributed across institutional orientation, materials, teaching practices, and assessment. Islamic representation and content are strongly embedded across courses, while performance outcomes and assessment criteria for tasks such as analyzing sources, explaining religious knowledge, teaching, and dawah communication are less consistently articulated. The study conceptualizes this pattern as a distributed specific purpose curriculum and proposes a development framework centered on multi stakeholder needs analysis, graded performance outcomes, contemporary authentic materials, text task cycles, performance assessment, and cross course alignment governance. The framework is conceptual rather than experimentally validated.
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