Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

Integrating L1 In L2 Classrooms: The Case Of Arabic As A Foreign Language In Us Universities, Martin Isleem

Faculty Journal Articles

For many years, instructors and scholars of the Arabic language in American high- er education schools have debated two pedagogical questions: (1) whether or not non-standardized Arabic varieties, Spoken Arabic, should be integrated with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the foreign Arabic classroom, and if so, (2) what that integration should look like (see Al-Batal, 2017). One of the prominent claims of those favoring MSA in the classroom is that MSA is the more prestigious language variety and therefore better represents Arabic literature, religious tradition and culture (Ryding, 1995:226) However, in the last two decades there has been an evolving …