Even with the shift to the study of Arabic as a modern language, most institutions have continued to lay the greatest stress in courses in non-Western languages on the acquisition of the reading skill. It is the recent emergence of "proficiency" as a national trend which has focused a great deal of attention on the oral-aural skills and has also served to re-emphasize the acquisitional benefits of the inter-relationships between the four skills.

For this reason, the Arabic program at Penn now adopts a four-skills approach to the teaching of all basic-level language courses. All students are expected to be able to function adequately within all four skills. Allowance is made, however, for students to indicate their own emphases or to compensate for their weaknesses in that, in the evaluation process, poor competence in one skill can be counterbalanced by better competence in another.

All language courses in Arabic at Penn are proficiency-based. Students are evaluated on their ability to perform authentic tasks in the target language. Their success is measured on a scale devised by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), in a way which assessed their ability to communicate with and receive information from a native speaker of the target language.

Beyond the basic-level sequence of courses (8 course units: ARAB 031-32, ARAB 033-34, ARAB 035-36, ARAB 37-38), there is a further course (one semester) which emphasizes the "active" skills (writing and speaking), incorporating within it activities involving the equivalent "passive" skills (reading and listening). Alongside these skill-based courses are reading courses devoted to specific topic-areas (social-sciences and literature, and Islamics), each of which emphasizes the development of genuine reading skills and the building up of specified vocabularies.

Beyond this level Penn offers a series of graduate seminar courses which concentrate on the application of a highly advanced reading skill to the areas specified within the graduate program.