Dec 2, 2011

American Association of Teacher of Arabic (AATA) Annual Meeting

Copyright © 2010 Aleya Rouchdy, All Rights Reserved

AATA is sponsoring a panel during the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in Washington DC on December 3, 2011. The panel’s title is: “Bridging the Gap between FuSHaa and the Arabic Dialects in the Teaching of Arabic as a Foreign Language.”

This perennial debate among teachers of Arabic about the diglossic nature of the language and of its teaching as a foreign language will never be settled. Teachers of Arabic have different views, different perceptions, different linguistic approaches, and different experiences in teaching the language. Such variation ought to lead to healthy debates.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend this year’s AATA meeting. It is a topic I would have liked to report and commented on in my blog. As an alternative I decided to add a post to introduce the authors and the titles of their papers. Anyone interested in the papers should contact the authors. I will.

The papers are;

Abdallah Chekayri, El Akhawayn University: “Intercultural Communication in Arabic as a Foreign language.”

Naima Boussofara, University of Kansas: “A New Integrative Textbook Generation.”

Ahmed Kabel, Al Akhawayn University: Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language: Problematizing the Standard/Colloquial Divide.”

Munther Younes, Cornell University: “Educated Spoken Arabic: A Solution to the Problem of the Colloquial in the Arabic Classroom?”

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