The Place of Heritage in Dictation Skills Training for Occupational Purposes (An Analytical Descriptive Study Based on Ibn Qutayba's Book, Adab-al-Katib; “Taqwim al-Yad”)

Dictation is one of the most important writing skills in communicating; therefore, its training is essential to eliminate errors in linguistic communication. Accordingly, strengthening this skill should be considered in preparing the appropriate content for the educational courses. This study reflects on the past compilations on dictation skills and attempts to examine the content of Adab-al-Katib written by Ibn Qutayba al-Dinawari (213-267AH). Part of the book, entitled "Taqwim-al-Yad" in 46 sections, teaches those scribers and writers who had a poor ability to write words such as “Hamza” and “Alef”. The present study aims to study two cases, based on descriptive method and content analysis (qualitative and quantitative method): The author's method of presenting content in three stages (categorization, dictation at the morphological-syntactic level, defining the rule and dictation error) and his method of checking the dictation errors. The results of the research indicate that the errors are in two parts: dictation of letters in verbs and nouns and dictation of names. According to graphs and statistical data, 59% of the educational content is dedicated to dictation of letters and 41% is dedicated to dictation of names. Among the writing principles, dictation of "Alef" had the most attention with 39%. The organization of the content under investigation has its positive and negative points, including failure in the observance of subject-alignment in content-segmentation. These data indicate the special attention of applied linguists to dictation skills in old times, as if they represent their innovative educational achievements as a significant advancement in the development of language skills for specific purposes, which makes us to follow their pattern, as a precious legacy.