ICESCO Announces ‘Bayan’ Award Recognizing Creative Expression in Arabic

Varieties

May 5th, 7:12am

Rabat - Asharq Al-Awsat

ICESCO announces the ‘Bayan’ Award recognizing creative expression in Arabic.

The Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO) has announced the launch of its new “Bayan” Award for Creative Expression in Arabic. The Award is part of “ICESCO Digital Home” and comes in line with its education initiative “Learn and Master Arabic at Home.” It will reward winners from the three age categories: youth ($2,000), teens ($1,500) and children ($1,000). “The Award aims to promote students’ creative productivity in Arabic during lockdown, highlight the universality of Arabic, support the continuity of the learning process, ensure complementarities between the educational and cultural dimensions and catalyze self-development of linguistic skills through creative writing and verbal expression,” according to ICESCO. The Award covers creative expression, in which students record their pronunciation and diction in a video based on a text they write in standard Arabic specifically for this contest (verse/prose, article, short story). The nominated works will cover the following themes: distance learning, family in the time of lockdown, hygiene and health, necessity is the mother of invention, solidarity during the state of emergency, the world post-COVID-19, investing time during lockdown and communication in the time of social distancing. In order to be nominated for the Award, the candidate must be a non-Arab student, whose native language is not Arabic. The work must be submitted through the student’s educational institution, which must only send one outstanding work for each category. Also, nominations received from member states must be submitted through national commissions and competent parties. ICESCO stated that the video must not exceed three minutes in length for children, four minutes for teens and five minutes for young people. It must not have been published or submitted to another competition before. The nomination file must include the video, the text written by the student and the nomination form duly filled in. The form is available at: http://www.icesco.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Nomination-Form-ICESCO-Bayan-Award.pdf Nominations must be sent prior to June 15 to the following e-mail: bayanaward@icesco.org The Organization pointed out that a jury will be tasked with examining nomination files and selecting winners who will be announced on its website via official letters to the competent parties. In addition to the monetary reward, the winners will be given certificates at a ceremony to be held after the end of lockdown. ICESCO had previously launched, through its Center of Arabic for non-Arabic Speakers, the initiative “Learn Arabic, Master it at Home,” in cooperation with “Granada Editions” and the “Saudi Electronic University” to allow free access to educational digital contents by non-Arabic speaking students from all over the world.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/2268141/icesco-announces-%E2%80%98bayan%E2%80%99-award-recognizing-creative-expression-arabic