Joëlle Faddoul, teacher and head of the doctoral program of the Institute of Oriental Letters at the Saint Joseph University of Beirut, was distinguished in Dubai for a research combining Arabic grammar and IA. The International Council of the Arabic Language was selected from among fifteen scholars honoured at the Twelfth International Congress of the Arabic Language, held from 28 to 30 October 2026.
His study was selected from approximately six hundred contributions from over seventy countries. It highlights an educational proposal: use the general AI to produce digital narratives adapted to learners, while keeping explicit language and educational rules.
Arabic Grammar and IA: starting from a story
The work is called SARD, an intelligent Arabic narrative design model. The idea is to present a grammatical rule in a told situation before naming it. The narrative thus becomes the context in which the learner encounters a construction of the language.
The researcher describes stories adapted to the target audience. The tool must not simply generate a text from a general policy: its production is framed by linguistic and pedagogical requirements. These requirements give the model its educational function.
Faddoul insists on this point: the originality that it defends lies in the method that frames the AI, rather than in the mere use of this technology. In her view, the correction of Arabic remains the first criterion. Automated generation should be used to learn the language, not to impose its formulations without control.
Distinguished Research in Dubai
Faddoul was the only Lebanese researcher among the 15 winners. Other honoured researchers included Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Nigeria, Turkey, China and Poland.
This recognition relates to academic work presented at a congress. It alone is not a measure of the effectiveness of the model among students. The information made public does not give any size of the school sample, nor does it give a quantitative comparison with any other method, nor does it give detailed results of an evaluation of apprenticeships.
Language control at the centre of the proposal
SARD’s interest lies in the place given to the construction of the narrative and at the level of the learner. A story is not just a dress designed to make a lesson more attractive. In the model described, it is used to reveal grammatical use in a context prior to its formal explanation.
Joëlle Faddoul’s work thus contributes to a concrete question for teaching: how to use a generic tool without abandoning the objectives of the course or checking what it produces? The distinction received in Dubai makes this proposal more visible. Its assessment with learners remains a point to be documented.
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