In the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language, teachers are continuously searching for new opportunities for their students to engage with the language outside of the classroom context. Such opportunities are valuable resources to develop students’ linguistic skills, cultural competencies, communicative performances and digital skills; thus, preparing them better to meet the 21st century standards for learning languages in meaningful ways. The paper, accordingly, presents a pedagogical model for using oral history as a pedagogical tool to connect Arabic classroom to local community and as a process for collecting primary source information and making them available as an open resource for other researches and teachers of Arabic. To this end, the research led a team of undergraduate Arabic students at the intermediate level to conduct an oral history digital collection project on the Arab American migrant community in central Ohio. Students collected face-to-face interviews and videos to document the experiences of Arab Americans on topics of mobility and migration, identity formation, and cultural practices. The central question of this project was to explore how Arab-Americans negotiate their hyphenated identities and adapt their cultural traditions. The mission of this project is three-fold: developing students’ communicative skils, engaging them with oral history to build their sense of civic engagement, and explore community issues, and providing the Arab American community with cultural visibility to introduce their values to a wider audience. In this presentation, the research will share the detailed stages of the project and students' involvement from conducting face-to-face video interviews to preserving and digitizing these interviews. In addition, the research will discuss the challenges associated with this project, its outcomes, pedagogical values and communal benefits. In conclusion, this model will be evaluated using a questionnaire and student’s testimonies.

This study is a part of a data-driven PhD dissertation that examines The Voice, the pan-Arab singing competition, as the case study. The study answers the questions: 1. “What are the linguistic features and patterns employed in Arabic inter-dialectal communication of The Voice? 2. How are these features and patterns employed and deployed in order to structure an intelligible popular pan-Arab media show? Communication instances in the show are analysed and discussed from the dimensions of polylingualism, crossing, community of practice, theory of practice, receptive multilingualism, and media semiotics. The study provides explanation on the meanings and indexicalities of these features on their micro level as well as the social and cultural meanings and values of these features and patterns in their totality on the macro level. The discussion further presents an understanding of the shared knowledge among Arabs that enables inter-dialectal communication and that are deployed by the producers of The Voice in order to structure a pan-Arab media that appeals to all the superdiverse elements that converge on the show in order to guarantee commercial profit. The analysis and the discussion show that a different meaning of pan-Arabism is being restructured in the show. Pan-Arabism, as it appears in the show, does not depend on a unified linguistic code shared by one nation that shares the same history, religion, and culture. As projected in the show, Pan-Arabism plays on the diversity of the idea of Arabness and who is an Arabic. This idea is rather presented by a recognition and awareness of the individuality of different and distinct Arab identities that is seen in their distinct national dialects. National dialects are acknowledged to exist and celebrated, and are taught and practiced as if they are foreign languages. Crossing to use features of each other’s national dialects as seen in the show is, on one hand, to welcome and recognize the individuality of this dialect. On the other hand, it marks the crosser as a foreign and alien who is trying to appeal to the people of this dialect. However, the Egyptian features are the most commonly shared and accessible linguistic resource. It is not the unifying code nor the lingua franca, but it is the linguistic resource where Arabs feel they have a right to and the knowledge of how to access its resources.

According to Simon Kemp, “digital [interaction] is growing faster in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world” (Lam and Radcliff, 2017 p. 4). Social media use in particular has steadily been increasing over the past decade due to greater accessibility to digital technologies for middle class families. Social media is used by the majority of people, especially youth under 30 years old, who make up sixty-five percent of the population in the Middle East. Despite these staggering percentages and the increasing role of social media in people’s lives, little attention has been given to West Bank Palestinian social media users. This project examines the full range of their social media and linguistic practices and motivations for their social media use. Palestinian society is considered by some to be socially conservative (Abdo, 1999; Hasso, 2001) in terms of communicative norms. Understanding the intricacies of social media use as a literacy practice can shed light on how Palestinians are preserving or challenging these conservative values, and the dynamic roles that social media is playing in changing social communication on a global scale. This study builds on previous work that examined the ways in which Palestinians are thwarting the traditional expectations of written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) on Facebook. This pilot study focused on language choice to examine if Palestinian social media users are opting to use formal written language, colloquial language, or a combination of the two on Facebook. Findings suggested that Palestinians consider Facebook a social sphere, more like synchronous face-to-face oral contexts and therefore are using more informal colloquial language in digital written form. The current study seeks to build on the previous one by looking deeply into the literacy and social media practices occurring on various technological devices. This study’s data sources include a survey of participants and an analysis of a self-selected collection of social media artefacts to identify Palestinian literacy practices and motivations for this social media use. Follow up interviews provide an additional source of data to examine linguistic choices users make in different social media contexts (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.). Triangulation across these data sources facilitates validation of data through cross verification. This presentation and paper will reveal the complex ways that Palestinians navigate social media to meet their social and communicative needs and examines new social dynamics that occur between various members of Palestinian society as they interact digitally.

This study examines the interplay between Arabic learners’ overall cross-cultural sensitivity and their willingness to engage in Arab cultural practices. The study aimed to better understand whether time spent studying Arabic language relates in some way to an increased willingness to participate in Arab culture on the part of learners or not. The study included 55 learners of Arabic at different levels of study, specifically first, second, and third years at a large Mid-Western university’s undergraduate Arabic program. The study used an adapted version of the cross-cultural sensitivity survey put forth by Cushner (1986), as well as a survey designed for the present study. Initial findings show that willingness to engage in Arab cultural practices shifts only slightly from year to year among Arabic learners in the study. The study questions possible reasons for the findings, and implications will be presented for integration of cultural practices and perspectives in Arabic language courses.

The presence of Arabic, as a heritage language, has been challenged by to the recent sociopolitical climate in the US which impedes its maintenance and expedites its attrition. Thus, a critical need arises to examine the interplay of language attitudes and ideologies and their role in the maintenance of Arabic as a minority language. Investigating language attitudes in different speech communities has been essential in understanding the roles that they play in language attrition (Baker, 1992) as pivotal component of human behavior (Edwards, 2011) and in shaping attitudes towards it speakers (Fasold, 1984; Garrett, 2010, Soulaimani, 2019). Many language studies in the Arab World have examined the relationship between the different Arabic varieties and their speakers (Miller, 2005; Sayahi, 2014; Hachimi, 2013; Cotter 2016). However, lesser focus through has been placed on the examination of intergenerational nature of language attitude in interdialectal diasporic contexts. This can shed light on the circulating language ideologies that shape the stratifications of these varieties and their speakers. Drawing on data from a larger corpus of language attitudes and use amongst Arab Americans, this paper uses a language questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, natural conversations to examine language attitudinal dispositions of speakers of different Arabic language varieties and the ideological relationship that organize its ingroup and outgroup members. The economic dominance of the speakers of Levantine and Egyptian varieties as a established communities in the US is conflated with their mediatized status in the Arab World which results into a puristic stance toward speakers of lesser mediatized, newly established ingroup varieties such as Maghrebi and Sudanese. The circulating language ideological beliefs, I argue, not only inhibit intergroup interactions but impedes the intergenerational maintenance of Arabic as heritage language. In light of these results, I discuss the implications that language attitudes and ideologies have on the heritage speakers’ limited exposure to different varieties of Arabic and the future prospects of the maintenance of Arabic as a minority language in the US.