Arabic teaching in the United States

Abstract

first I will give a brief description of the Arabic language teaching situation in the United States, the universities, the textbooks used and methods involved; in the second I will place the methods described in the context of my own experiments in language teaching and of attempts to solve particular problems associated with language learning at the university level. Institutions of higher learning at which Arabic is taught in the United States will now be divided into four categories, although I hasten to point out that there is nothing official about such a subdivision; it is merely an attempt at clarification: 1. There are now very few universities in which Arabic is taught exclusively within departments devoted to comparative Semitic studies, thus emphasizing reading and writing skills only for the purposes of philology, lexicography, palaeography and other kindred disciplines. Yale is perhaps the only surviving such university. 2. The largest number of universities teach Arabic within departments called Departments of Middle/Near East(ern) Languages (and Literatures), or, occasionally, Oriental Studies (as at my own universityl). In the majority of such cases the department will either be itself, or else have attached to it, a Centre funded by the United States Government under the National Defense and Education Act (NDEA), Title VI (and, to a lesser extent, Title IV). These centres are intended to foster the study of the Middle East in the modern period in all disciplines. In this connection some points of explanation are necessary. From the very beginning the criteria set up by the United States Government have been quite generous; it has been possible for students doing postgraduate degrees in the languages of the Ancient Near East, for example, to support themselves through Title VI, provided that they took a modern Near Eastern language as well. Secondly, the original criteria for the implementation of this Act, which led to the proliferation of centres in the 1960s, have recently been revised, and some centres have disappeared. Others have expanded, or have amalgamated with similar centres close by. In the present context it is sufficient to note that the Arabic programmes at universities with such centres still usually conform with the goals of the NDEA, whether or not they are still financed by it. 3. Other Arabic programmes are to be found in departments which need not necessarily have anything to do with the Middle East. These will tend to be low-budget programmes to meet a local need for one or two languages of the Middle East and will usually have a small staff (one or two teachers). For example, the Arabic programme at Ohio State University is in the Department of Romance Languages, while at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton it was till recently in the Department of Classics. In the latter case increased demand has led to the formation of a separate department for the Semitic Languages, a common model of expansion in such cases.