al-Kalim: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa Arab dan Kebahasaaraban
Journal of Arabic Language Education and Arabic Studies
al-Kalim: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa Arab dan Kebahasaaraban welcomes original scholarly manuscripts related to Arabic language education, applied linguistics, Arabic linguistics and language studies, textual studies, and philological research.
Submitted manuscripts must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration by another journal. The journal applies a double-blind peer-review process. Authors must therefore prepare a separate title page containing all identifying information and submit a fully anonymized manuscript for review.
Manuscripts should fall within one or more of the following areas:
All articles should demonstrate a clear scholarly contribution, whether theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, linguistic, social, cultural, or practical.
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Manuscript length | 4,500–7,000 words |
| Typical page length | Generally 7–20 pages |
| Minimum references | 30 sources |
| Main font | Times New Roman, 10–11 pt |
| Arabic font | Amiri |
| Line spacing | 1.0 |
| Paragraph spacing | 0 pt before and after |
| Margins | 2.54 cm on all sides |
| Primary citation style | APA 7th Edition |
| Similarity | Maximum 20%, subject to editorial policy |
| Recent scholarship | Prioritize the most recent 5 years |
| Main file format | .docx |
| Figure resolution | Minimum 300 dpi when applicable |
Manuscripts may be written in a language appropriate to the journal's scope. If the manuscript is written in Indonesian or Arabic, authors must provide an English abstract and a second abstract in the manuscript language. Academic language, spelling, grammar, transliteration, and citation style must be carefully checked before submission.
The separate title page should contain:
The blinded manuscript must remove all author names, affiliations, identifying acknowledgments, and document metadata. File names, document properties, tables, figures, and supplementary files must also be checked for identifying information. Self-citations should be written neutrally during review.
The English abstract should be approximately 250 words, written in one paragraph, and organized substantively according to:
Background → Purpose → Method → Results → Conclusion
Briefly explain the research context, key problem, and why the issue is important.
State the research objective and/or principal research question.
Summarize the research design, participants or data sources, instruments or data collection, and analytical method.
Report two or three principal findings using concrete information. Avoid vague statements that do not reveal the substance of the results.
State the meaning of the findings, the main contribution, and the principal implication.
The abstract must be accurate, concise, and non-evaluative. Citations should be avoided unless indispensable.
Provide 3–5 keywords or key phrases that accurately represent the main concepts of the manuscript and facilitate indexing and discovery.
If the manuscript is written in Indonesian or Arabic, provide a second abstract in the manuscript language in addition to the English abstract. Both abstracts must communicate the same purpose, method, findings, and conclusion.
The standard manuscript structure is:
Additional sections may be used where required by the nature of philological, textual, or historical-linguistic research.
The Introduction should generally account for approximately 20–25% of the main text. It must develop one coherent scholarly argument rather than present a thesis-style literature review that summarizes previous studies one by one.
The recommended argumentative sequence is:
Problem & Context → Significance → State of the Art → Critical Synthesis → Research Gap → Novelty/Originality → Research Questions/Hypotheses → Objectives → Contributions
Introduce the academic phenomenon or problem, research context, and evidence demonstrating why the problem is real and important.
Explain the urgency of the research and its theoretical, pedagogical, linguistic, social, cultural, and/or practical consequences.
Organize previous research by theme, theory, method, findings, context, or scholarly debate. Compare, connect, and evaluate the studies. Prioritize recent scholarship while retaining classic or foundational sources when needed.
Explicitly identify what remains unknown, untested, inconsistent, unexplained, or theoretically/methodologically weak.
State what is genuinely new in the study, such as the context, data, approach, model, theory, method, comparison, or interpretation. Explain how the study extends, corrects, challenges, or complements previous research.
The final part of the Introduction should state the research question(s) or hypothesis where relevant, the research objective(s), and the study's theoretical and practical contributions.
Every verifiable scholarly claim should be supported by appropriate evidence or references.
For empirical research, the Method section should ideally comprise approximately 10–15% of the article. It must provide sufficient detail for the study to be evaluated and, where possible, replicated.
Explain the research type/design, paradigm or approach, unit of analysis, rationale for selecting the design, and alignment with the research questions and objectives.
Describe the setting, population, sample, respondents or informants, relevant participant characteristics, inclusion/exclusion criteria, sampling or selection technique, and justification. For text-based research, identify documents, corpora, manuscripts, editions, or other primary sources.
Describe tests, questionnaires, interview protocols, observation instruments, rubrics, corpus tools, software, equipment, text editions, or other materials. Explain development, adaptation, and evidence of validity where relevant.
Describe data collection chronologically, including who performed the procedures, what was done, when and under what conditions it took place, the duration, any intervention or treatment, and how procedures were documented.
Explain the quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, corpus, linguistic, or philological analysis, including coding or testing stages, software where used, and how each analysis addresses the research question(s).
Report validity, reliability, triangulation, member checking, inter-rater agreement, audit trail, robustness checks, or other quality-assurance procedures where applicable. For research involving human participants, explain informed consent, confidentiality/anonymity, and ethics approval or institutional permission where required.
This is the core section of the article and should generally comprise approximately 40–60% of the main text. Organize it by research question or analytical theme.
Each subsection should follow the analytical sequence:
Finding → Evidence → Interpretation → Connection to Theory → Comparison with Previous Studies → Contribution/Implication
State the principal finding directly and specifically, ensuring that it answers the relevant research question.
Present appropriate evidence such as numerical results, participant quotations, linguistic examples, Arabic texts, corpus patterns, tables, figures, or other primary evidence.
Interpret the finding, explain plausible reasons for it, connect it with theory or concepts, compare it with previous research, explain whether it supports, extends, challenges, or corrects existing literature, and end with the contribution or implication.
Do not merely repeat tables, quotations, or numerical results without analysis.
The Conclusion should not merely summarize the article. It should directly answer the research objective(s) and research question(s), synthesize the most important findings, state the contribution and implications, and proportionally explain limitations and future research directions.
State the final answer to the research question(s) or objective(s) and synthesize the most important findings.
Explain the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, linguistic, policy, or practical contribution.
Identify limitations that affect interpretation or generalizability and propose future research directions that logically follow from the findings.
Do not introduce new data or references that were not discussed earlier.
Acknowledge individuals, institutions, technical assistance, or funding sources that supported the research. If there was no specific funding, authors may state:
Use author initials to describe each author's contribution. For example:
Authors must disclose whether generative artificial intelligence tools were used during manuscript preparation.
If AI was used:
If AI was not used:
Authors must disclose any potential conflict of interest. If none exists, state:
Explain where and under what conditions the data can be accessed. Provide a repository link or DOI when available. If the data cannot be made openly available, state the relevant ethical or legal reason.
Manuscripts must include at least 30 references. For Arabic language education and applied-linguistics articles, use APA 7th Edition.
Philological and textual studies must be anchored in primary sources rather than relying only on translations or secondary scholarship.
Primary sources may include Arabic manuscripts, critical editions, classical texts, corpora, inscriptions, archival sources, or other primary materials.
When appropriate, references may be separated into:
For philological articles, source-critical footnotes may be used in addition to the final bibliography according to editorial instructions.
Use Unicode characters throughout and use the Amiri font for Arabic script. Avoid replacing editable Arabic text with images.
Arabic words transliterated in Latin-script prose must follow the journal's transliteration system consistently. Linguistic and dialectological articles may use additional phonetic notation and IPA where analytically necessary.
| Arabic | Transliteration | Arabic | Transliteration |
|---|---|---|---|
| خ | ḫ | ح | ḥ |
| ع | ʿ | ء | ʾ |
| ض | ḍ | ص | ṣ |
| ش | š | ج | ǧ |
| ذ | ḏ | غ | ġ |
| ظ | ẓ | ط | ṭ |
| ث | ṯ | — | — |
Long vowels are written as ā, ī, ū. Examples include al-šams, al-kitāb, ʿarabī, ʿarabiyya, and Risālat al-Tarbīʿ wa-l-tadwīr. Hamza is written as ʾ and ʿayn as ʿ, not as ordinary apostrophes.
Use consistent hierarchical numbering where needed, for example:
Use subheadings only when they serve a clear analytical or argumentative function.
Use Common Era dates as the primary form. For pre-Nahḍa authors or sources, Hijri dates may also be supplied where relevant, for example: 700/1300.
Define abbreviations at first mention and use them consistently thereafter.
Footnotes may be used for supplementary explanation, textual commentary, or philological purposes. Place footnote markers after punctuation. Do not move information that belongs in the main argument into footnotes.
For approved philological or classical-studies articles, source notes may provide the full reference at first mention and a shortened form thereafter, together with a final bibliography.
For studies involving human participants, authors should report informed consent, confidentiality/anonymity, and ethics approval or institutional permission where required. Authors are responsible for ensuring that research procedures comply with appropriate scholarly and institutional ethical standards.
Manuscripts must be original. The maximum similarity level is 20%, subject to editorial policy. All quotations, ideas, data, and third-party materials must be properly cited or licensed where required.
Authors should prepare at least two files:
Contains the article title, author names, affiliations, corresponding-author details, ORCID identifiers, acknowledgment, and identifying funding information where applicable.
Must not contain author-identifying information. File names, document properties, tables, figures, and supplementary materials must also be anonymized.
After acceptance, proof-stage changes should be limited to factual and typographical corrections. Substantial revisions should be avoided.
Where appropriate, authors may include appendices such as instruments, rubrics, additional tables, coding schemes, or supplementary texts.
The main manuscript should be prepared in Microsoft Word (.docx) format. A PDF version may also be supplied if requested. High-resolution figures may be required as separate files.
The article template does not explicitly specify the following items. They should therefore be added to the journal website only after formal editorial approval:
PEOPLE
POLICIES
SUBMISSIONS
ARTICLE TEMPLATE
TOOLS
VISITOR
