Arabic Archive

Between December 15 and 17, 2017, I attended and presented at a conference titled: “Approaches and Challenges in Arabic Language Pedagogy” at the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. This conference is one of the very few conferences focused on the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language. This was a chance to get…

With the increased interest in studying Arabic as a foreign language in universities around the world, the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) attempts to respond to the needs of students and programs by creating Arabic language instructional materials and pioneering much needed research in the field. Because of the generous grant…

How can the language classroom account for the ecologies of language that generate bilingual and multilingual practices, attitudes, and cultural products? Using texts and media that incorporate French and Arabic, this project develops lesson plans to engage students in the critical appraisal of the values, agencies, and registers that shape language use in francophone cultures. …

Arabic: A More Commonly Taught Less Commonly Taught Language by Professor Roger Allen, Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, University of Pennsylvania. After presenting an introduction to the Arabic language and its history, I consider the development of Arabic-language pedagogy within academe over the course of the past half-century. Within the context of current discussions about…

The teaching of Arabic in American universities today, like that of so many other more commonly taught foreign languages, has by and large come to be guided by the same communicative approach objectives that regularly inform the profession as a whole, such that curricula frequently place an explicit emphasis on the development of the four…

Colloquium: Language, Identity and Change in the Modern Arab World: Implications for the Study of Language and Culture   Social History, Political History, and Dialect Prestige in the Arab World: The Cases of Bahrain, Jordan and Iraq Clive Holes, Oxford University UniversityNegotiating Diaspora: Translation and the Language of Exile Ibrahim Muhawi, Edinburgh Identity and Language…

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally “non-Western” countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces multilingual subjects (Kramsch, 2010) and considerable tensions with the micro discourses of these subjects. Our findings show ...

Learning Arabic, a category IV less commonly taught language, can be a daunting task even with the luxury of a five-day per week schedule, good teachers, office hours, and solid learning materials. This study reports on the successes and challenges of teaching Arabic within a distance-learning environment. ...

This is an action research study that reports on using student portfolios in a second language (L2) Arabic class. The goal of this study was to examine the validity of using portfolios as an L2 assessment procedure and to ascertain the effectiveness of portfolios as an L2 learning tool. In this class, portfolios ...

Arabic is a diglossic language, and learners must become competent in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and a spoken dialect. However, Arabic dialects are typically not taught in U.S. classrooms. One reason is the question of which dialect to teach? This study looks at two cases of transfer between ...