The purpose of this paper is to introduce to AFL instructors the effectiveness of teaching 25th January Egyptian Revolution as a frame work for content based instruction course. It was crucial after the 25th January Egyptian revolution to develop a new course focusing on political and cultural aspects, using language as a medium for learning the content. According to Stoller (2002), content based instruction is intended to foster the integration of language and content viewing, “language as a medium for learning content and content as a resource for learning and improving language”. Brinton et al (2004), emphasized the importance of concurrently teaching content and language, that is, the integration of language and content is considered a desirable and an effective method of language learning rather than the traditional methods of learning. Developers of the new course focused on the period starting from the first 18 days of the 25th Egyptian Revolution, which were presented in a clear, sequential chronological order in addition to the main events, until present time. The teaching materials were selected from various talk shows, reports, articles, documentary films, audio program, short stories, songs, poetry, jokes, Graffiti, cartoons, banners and Caricatures, in addition to field trips and interviews with native speakers. The most important consideration for developing this new course were the interest level for the student and their need for understanding such an important socio-political and cultural event and to enrich their knowledge about the Egyptian revolution through language. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is to investigate: ( 1 ) logistics of developing content based course to help students master and integrate both language and content ,(2) useful real world instructional activities and interactions to promote students’ mastering content and language, (3) skills and strategies to be considered when teaching such courses. In an attempt to improve and enhance the course an anonymous survey was designed and distributed by the help of CLT at the end of the semester in order to explore ( 1) student’s attitudes towards new course, ( 2) the extent the new course improved their language abilities and enriched their knowledge regarding 25th Egyptian Revolution, (3) students’ perspectives and suggestions for improving the course specifically about activities, assignments, etc. Analysis of the students’ feedback revealed important points that were incorporated in the course.

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) communities of practice (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners (HLLs), and three second language (L2) learners. These learners were the first cohort of students to participate in a new government-funded university Arabic Flagship Program. Employing both a macro-level ethnographic analysis and a micro-level discourse analysis of video-taped classroom interaction, this study analyzes how participants displayed their individual and relational identities (Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997), community membership, and levels of participation in this classroom community through conversational joking and responses to canned joke-telling by the teacher. I present three examples from my classroom interaction data, and analyze them through notions of frames, footing, keying (Goffman, 1974, 1981; Gumperz, 1982), double-voicing (Bakhtin, 1986), and other contexualization cues. I also draw on the findings of previous research on humor in conversation (e.g., Bell, 2002; Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997; Norrick, 1993, 2004; Sacks, 1995) and humor in the classroom (e.g., Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004) in interpreting my data. The findings reveal a shared repertoire of humor practices by learners, such as teasing classmates by code-switching into other dialects of Arabic which differed from a student’s own heritage dialect, parodying the teacher’s voice, employing Arabic “God-phrases” in teasing, ironic, and hyperbolic ways, and a hierarchical display of responses and peer scaffolding to canned jokes told by the teacher. I argue that these humor practices were not only sites for identity display and relational identity display by my participants, but they also helped to mitigate tensions, soften face-threatening acts, and protect members’ positive face needs in the classroom, ultimately contributing to the creation of a very inclusive, close-knit community with relatively low language learning anxiety for all its members. I also suggest that these humor practices created beneficial contexts for scaffolding and learning of Arabic culture and dialect.

Teaching Arabic Literature remains one of the most challenging, yet important components of a comprehensive Arabic program. Often the volume and lexical difficulty of texts, as well as their cultural contexts, intimidate students at the intermediate and lower advanced levels. Students also may see the focus too heavily on reading at the expense of the other three language skills. This study will present and discuss an innovative method for teaching Arabic literature that is adaptable to different proficiency levels. Using instructor-selected excerpts, with targeted cultural and linguistic preparation, students “engage” the central themes of the texts by assuming key roles. Through either written or verbal interaction, students negotiate critical points of literary texts in a logical sequence, reconstructing the main narrative directions. These techniques include dialogue construction, debate, role playing and reflective writing. While not a substitute for complete, close reading of long works, it serves as a bridge for students not yet at a sufficient proficiency level for reading novel-length texts. The guiding concept is to encourage students to engage the texts on a personal level. This study will use example lessons based on two Modern Arabic novels, Najib Mahfuz’s Before the Throne and Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, created for upper intermediate and lower advanced students, respectively. These examples will illustrate how an integrated series of lessons can be produced to reflect the central narrative of a single text. The study will also discuss structural and cultural characteristics of the Arabic language and Arabic literary genres that can be explored though student engagement. Student activities to explore modern treatment of the Arab concept of the traditional hakawati as it influenced both Mahfuz’s and Kanafani’s novels will be used as an example to illustrate how this technique may be applied in a practical way.

With the growing impact of social-networking in the Middle East, one of the biggest education markets to benefit from it is language learning. The opportunities for incorporating Web 2.0 applications for language curriculum are rapidly increasing. These tools can be used to create vocabulary building skills, improve language fluency in different modalities, and most importantly enhance intercultural communicative competence (ICC).The interrelationship between language and culture has become much stronger than before as a result of the communicative language teaching approach. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) define communicative competence in language learning as “the ability to interpret and enact appropriate social behaviors,” which requires the active involvement of the learner in the production of the target language. Also, Lustig and Koester (2009) contend that culture is not genetically ingrained in humans. Rather, people learn it through interactions with their parents, other family members, friends, and even strangers who are part of the culture. With that being said, interaction through telecollaboration can be perceived as a potential factor in building ICC by creating opportunities for virtual interactions that target developing this vital component of language competence. This paper surveys recent language learning studies that involved telecollaborative activities with the main goal of developing ICC between two groups of students in two different locations, learning the same language or two different languages. These activities are designed to involve at least one student of each group in small virtual groups to discuss and reflect on topics that raise cultural awareness and sensitivity. Frameworks presented such as Byram’s (1997), Byram, Nichols and Steven’s (2001), and Bennett (1993) are used to measure students ICC in knowledge, skills, attitude and awareness. Additionally, the paper sheds light on various factors that were found to facilitate the development of students' ICC, like activity components, student characteristics, and teacher’s characteristics. As a result of surveying research studies in this area, the presenter highlights the lack of studies that target ICC in Arabic, as opposed to English, Spanish, and German. In conclusion, an online course design that incorporates Web 2.0 tools and online activities to create interaction opportunities between English students in a university in the Arab world and Arabic students in a university in the US to develop ICC is proposed to be one of the trail blazing studies done on Arabic to develop ICC.

While immersion and study abroad programs have reported fast proficiency attainment, there has been no empirical investigation as to the extent of the success of such programs. Additionally, it is not clear if second language acquisition stages and processes are the same as those observed in non-intensive settings. Equally important, both theoretically and practically, is the question of whether learning in an intensive setting overrides the role or interference of the native language in learning a second language. From a theoretical perspective, three main proposals have been advanced: (1) full mastery is not possible irrespective of input and instruction (e.g., Beck 1998), (2) full mastery is possible, depending on the nature of the native language system and whether or not it is similar to that of the second language (e.g., Hawkins and Chan 1997) and (3) full mastery is possible but depends on the ability of the second language learner in figuring out the mapping complexity between surface structures and underlying abstract features (e.g., Lardiere 2007; De Garavito and White 2002). From a practical perspective, the implications of findings from studies on foreign language learning in intensive versus non-intensive settings are significant for informing and subequently orienting and optimizing the teaching syllabus. The paper reports on an empirical study of learning Arabic as a foreign language in intensive versus non-intensive settings in light of the three theoretical claims mentioned above. Two sets of cross-sectional production data are used from three proficiency levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced: one set gathered in a non- intensive setting from speakers of Chinese and Russian speakers and the other gathered in an intensive setting from Russian and Chinese speakers. While Russian exhibits rich inflectional/grammatical features (like Arabic), Chinese lacks such features. The selection of the native language backgrounds from both ends of the continuum, such as Russian and Chinese (i.e., with a system that resembles closely that of Arabic and a system that is quite unlike Arabic), is significant in order to control for the role of the native language variable and to provide the most unambiguous findings—since English, for example, exhibits a system that falls in the middle. The target structures reported on are: nominal and verbal agreement. Preliminary findings indicate that input frequency is a statistically significant factor in learning the target forms. The paper concludes by drawing implications from the study for previously published findings on acquisition of Arabic by English speakers.