IB DP Arabic A Online Tutor in Dubai

The useful first question is not about Arabic. It is about the arrangement the student is in, because the same subject produces three entirely different pieces of work. A student in a taught class needs a second reader and marked essays. A self-taught Standard Level candidate needs the course delivered. A student weighing Arabic A against Arabic B needs a placement judgement made from written evidence rather than from how they sound at the dinner table.

Getting this wrong is expensive. Families sometimes buy a term of general Arabic conversation for a student who is already fluent and whose problem is written register in Modern Standard Arabic. Others buy literary discussion for a self-taught candidate who has not yet obtained two of the nine works and has no reading timetable. In both cases the tutoring is competent and aimed at the wrong thing, and nobody discovers it until a mock.

So the first session asks for documents. Which Arabic A course and level is the student registered for, or intending to register for. Whether the school teaches it or is supporting a self-taught candidate. The list of works. The most recent marked written piece in Arabic. And, separately, how the student is doing in the school's mandatory Arabic lessons, because those two subjects are frequently confused and the answer tells us a great deal about register.

The table-free answer to all this is short: the route determines the plan, and the route is a matter of fact rather than of preference. The sections below set out what each route actually involves, starting with the one families are given least information about.

Provision varies sharply across the emirate. Some Dubai schools teach Arabic A at both levels and both courses with full staffing. Some teach Standard Level Literature only. Some offer no Arabic A and will register a school-supported self-taught candidate instead. A family's realistic options are set by which of those their school is, and the answer comes from the IB coordinator rather than from the prospectus.

The self-taught route carries two hard limits that are worth repeating because they are frequently misunderstood. It applies to Language A: Literature, not to Language and Literature. And it is available at Standard Level only. A student who wants Arabic A at Higher Level needs a school that teaches it. A family planning on self-taught Higher Level is planning on something that does not exist, and discovering that after subject registration closes is a serious problem.

What the school does provide for a self-taught candidate is registration, a supervisor and the administrative handling of submissions. What it does not provide is teaching. The supervisor is not a subject teacher in this arrangement and should not be expected to mark essays weekly or teach nine works. Being clear about that boundary early keeps the relationship with the school good, which matters because every deadline and submission still goes through them.

The table below sets the three routes side by side, with what each one leaves to the family. Confirm the detail with your child's coordinator, since registration rules and school provision both change, and we publish no IB examination or results dates on this page because the IB's own site does not serve its calendar to automated checks.

A large share of Dubai families considering Arabic A are really asking about the bilingual diploma. The main route is straightforward: complete two languages from Group 1 and achieve grade 3 or above in both, and the diploma is awarded as bilingual. For an Arabic-speaking student in an English-medium Dubai school, that usually means English A plus Arabic A, which is a heavy Group 1 load but an entirely normal one.

The second route is much less discussed and sometimes more practical. A candidate who completes a subject from Group 3 or Group 4 in a language other than their nominated Language A, with grade 3 or above in both that subject and the Language A, also receives a bilingual diploma. For a student whose school teaches a humanities or science subject in Arabic, that can deliver the same outcome without carrying two full Group 1 courses.

Both routes depend on grades rather than on registration alone, which is worth saying plainly. A student who registers for Arabic A and finishes with a 2 does not get a bilingual diploma and has spent two years on a seventh commitment. The honest question in Year 11 is therefore not whether the student would like a bilingual diploma but whether a 3 or better in Arabic A is a realistic target given their written fusha, and a marked piece of writing answers that better than a conversation.

Nothing about this requires tutoring, and no honest page should imply it does. What tutoring can do is give you the evidence for the decision before subject choices close, and then support whichever route the family picks.

Arabic A is assessed in Modern Standard Arabic. Most students in Dubai speak a dialect at home - Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, Iraqi, Sudanese, Maghrebi - and move between dialect and fusha without thinking about it. That bilingual facility is an asset in conversation and a liability in an examination script, because the dialect forms are invisible to the student. They do not feel like errors; they feel like Arabic.

The errors are predictable enough to drill. Verb conjugation patterns that have levelled in speech, case endings dropped in the spoken form, vocabulary that is ordinary in dialect and wrong in formal writing, and sentence structures that work aloud and read as speech on paper. A student who logs their own corrected errors for a month usually finds the same six or seven patterns repeating, and once they are named they stop appearing within a term.

This is also why fluency is a bad placement signal. A student who converses confidently in Arabic may write at a level that will not sustain Arabic A, and a quieter student who reads Arabic literature comfortably may be a strong candidate. The test that answers the question is a piece of timed written analysis in fusha, marked honestly. It takes one session and it prevents a two-year mistake.

A note on the mandatory Arabic lessons here, because the two subjects interact. KHDA requires Standard Arabic as the main language of instruction for Arabic as a first language, which means a student in that stream is already working in fusha for part of the week. A student in the non-Arab stream is not, and that difference shows up quickly in Arabic A written work. Knowing which stream a student has been in is one of the more useful pieces of background a tutor can have.

For a taught course the school chooses the works. For a self-taught Standard Level candidate the choice is made with the supervisor, and it is where a good decision saves a year of difficulty. Nine works at Standard Level, drawn with the required balance of works originally written in Arabic, works in translation, and a limited allowance of freely chosen titles, covering several literary forms, periods and regions.

Two practical filters are worth applying before any literary judgement. The first is obtainability in Dubai, in the edition the student will cite from: page references matter for close reading, and a student working from a different printing than their supervisor creates a steady low-level problem for two years. The older bookshops in Bur Dubai and Al Karama remain the best physical source for Arabic titles in the city. The second filter is length. A poetry collection and a long modern novel both count as one work and demand completely different amounts of evening reading.

Then the allocation rule applies, exactly as it does in every Language A: a work used for one assessment component cannot be used for another. The individual oral needs two works, one of which must be a work in translation and the other originally written in Arabic. Paper 2 needs two more. For a self-taught Standard Level candidate that is four of nine committed, and the decision should be taken in the autumn of Year 12 rather than discovered in the spring of Year 13.

On works in translation specifically, Arabic A students make the same mistake English A students make in reverse: they analyse the Arabic of a translated novel as though the author had chosen those words. Structure, narrative method, imagery and context all survive translation and are fully available for analysis. The translator's diction is not. Two short written exercises settle this permanently.

This is the single most common confusion in Dubai, and it is worth separating completely. Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and social and moral studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, under requirements KHDA has set out and which schools were required to implement by the start of the 2025-26 academic year. Arabic A is an IB Diploma subject the student chose. They share a language and nothing else.

The KHDA requirements are specific in ways that affect a student's week. Schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, and combined classes for both groups are prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is required as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, and for Social Studies for Arab students, while non-Arabs are taught Islamic Education and moral, social and cultural studies in the school's licensed-curriculum language.

Instructional time is counted in 40-minute lesson units. Schools may vary lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and KHDA advises that any mandatory subject lesson should run at least 25 minutes. For the mandatory subjects, using different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is prohibited, which is a real constraint on what any tutoring material for those lessons can look like - and a reason to be sceptical of anyone selling a bespoke curriculum for them.

One further credential point a parent can reasonably check: schools are required to ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold appropriate KHDA approval to teach those subjects. That applies to the school's staff. It is not something IB Gram holds or could hold, and any tutoring service implying otherwise about itself is misrepresenting a specific regulatory permission.

Families frequently assume that strong Arabic helps with the Ministry of Education equivalency a UAE university application depends on. For the British track the published position is the opposite of that assumption. A student must show five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at a grade no lower than E or grade 3, plus one accredited subject at Advanced Level with a grade no lower than E, or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects.

For the American track the published requirements are about English and mathematics rather than Arabic: English proficiency evidenced by a score of 5 in IELTS academic, 61 in TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, and at least 450 in SAT Mathematics before applying. One ranking competitor states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the published rule is five, and getting that detail right matters more than anything else on this subject.

For the International Baccalaureate we will not publish a points threshold. We have not read one on the Ministry's own site, and an unsourced figure on a page like this would be repeated by families as fact. Ask the Ministry of Education or your emirate's attestation authority directly for the IB position, and treat any site that quotes a specific IB equivalency score without citing the Ministry with caution.

Two further points. Equivalency and attestation are processes the authorities run, not services IB Gram performs or guarantees, and nothing about tutoring is required for either. The sensible use of this information is planning: a student choosing subjects in Year 11 should know which of them will count towards equivalency, because Arabic A may be the right choice for a bilingual diploma while counting for nothing in that particular arithmetic.

Dubai families often begin by looking for an Arabic tutor who will come to the house, which is the traditional pattern here, so both halves of this deserve a straight answer. IB Gram delivers tuition to UAE families as one-to-one lessons over live video on Gulf Standard Time. We do not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE; home visits are a service we run only in India, and no line on this site should be read as an offer of one in Dubai.

For Arabic A the supply argument is stronger than for almost any other subject. Plenty of people in Dubai can teach Arabic. The number who have taught the IB Diploma's Arabic A course, who know what criterion B asks for in a Paper 1 on an unseen Arabic passage, and who can mark an essay in fusha against the published descriptors is far smaller. The chance that one of them lives within a short drive of a given community is low, and restricting the search to that radius means selecting an Arabic teacher instead of an Arabic A teacher.

The format also fits the work. Essays are annotated on a shared screen in Arabic and saved, so a register error log accumulates across a term instead of living on loose paper. Oral rehearsals are recorded without arranging anything, which is how a student hears their own register sliding into dialect. And a self-taught Standard Level candidate - who by definition has no class - gets a scheduled weekly teaching session that does not depend on anybody's commute.

On price, the figures below are published Dubai market rates gathered in October 2026, each attributed to the provider that published it. They are market rates and not an IB Gram price list; the route in here is a free trial lesson and a consultation, because the rate depends on the route, the level and availability. For context, KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not rise for the 2026-27 academic year.

The individual oral, the HL essay and the Extended Essay must be the student's own work, and on a self-taught course the temptation to blur that is higher than anywhere else, because there is no class and no teacher checking progress weekly. So the boundary is stated before the first session. A tutor teaches the works, explains what each criterion asks for, questions a line of inquiry until the student sharpens it, and gives written feedback on drafts the student has produced. Nobody supplies prose in Arabic, nobody rewrites paragraphs, and nobody provides an argument to be adopted.

We also do not distribute IB, Cambridge or Pearson documents. Subject guides, prescribed reading lists, past material and mark schemes belong to the boards, and a tutor cites the official page while the school or family obtains them properly. For the KHDA mandatory subjects there is an additional and specific rule: using different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is prohibited, so any service offering its own curriculum for those lessons is offering something the school cannot use.

On permits, the UAE position is clear and parents should ask about it directly. The MoHRE private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years, and covers teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, university students and school students aged fifteen to eighteen. MoHRE lists no fee and a two-working-day completion time on its own service page. Individuals tutoring without the permit are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws, and because no fine schedule has been published, nobody should quote you an amount.

One more boundary that applies with particular force to Arabic. Abu Dhabi's ADEK professional-ethics rules prohibit private and charter school staff from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE permit carries a code of conduct that also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school. Asking your child's own Arabic teacher for paid lessons is therefore the wrong route, however convenient it looks.