The potential of L2 visual materials for teaching cultural conceptualizations has not been fully realized in foreign language pedagogy, despite research indicating that viewing faces and images which cue the student’s native culture “hinders second-language processing by priming first-language structures” (Zhang et al, 2013). This paper argues that enabling student acquisition of L2 conceptualizations is an essential but underdeveloped component of teaching literacy and culture in the TAFL classroom. I present an argument for using diverse, multimodal materials to stimulate conceptual fluency at the lower levels of Arabic teaching, synthesizing theoretical and practical aspects of intercultural and related competences, multiliteracies, and conceptual perspectives on language teaching. I highlight the relevance of multimodal material for developing multiliteracy skills in high-frequency communicative settings such as email, online forums, blogs, and news media, as well as popular social-media platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. To support the argument for incorporating diverse visual material, I provide examples of methods, materials, and outcomes developed for novice to intermediate-level, non-heritage students of Arabic at New York University Abu Dhabi, and include student samples collected over the course of three semesters. I also introduce a web resource I have developed to facilitate the integration of relevant still images and videoclips into novice-intermediate Arabic curricula. This resource addresses various issues that inhibit incorporation of visual material into the Arabic classroom: 1) the challenge of locating material that represents a range of Arabic speaking cultures 2) the difficulty of identifying level-appropriate material 3) the time required for its collection and 4) the need to access material in a convenient format. Images and videoclips from a variety of online sources are shared and cited on an open source blog platform and tagged with vocabulary from parts 1 and 2 of the Al-Kitaab textbook. The format of presentation allows teachers to locate appropriate material by typing a vocabulary item into the search bar or by choosing a specific category. References Zhang, Shu et al. “Heritage-Culture Images Disrupt Immigrants’ Second-Language Processing through Triggering First-Language Interference.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.28 (2013): 11272–11277. www.pnas.org.

This study investigated how native speakers (NS) and advanced non-native speakers (NNS) of Arabic use connectives to signal semantic relations in expository and argumentative writing. This exploratory, descriptive study analyzed 100 expository texts and 100 argumentative texts, divided equally between the NS and NNS groups. Connectives were examined in terms of (1) their functions and the type of discourse relations they signaled in the clause-, sentence-, and paragraph-initial positions, and (2) the similarities and differences between the NS and NNS groups in terms of connectives use. The study adopted Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1988) to follow a semantic-functional approach to the analysis of discourse relations and connectives. The study identified 2,964 connectives that were not confined to the grammatical category of ?ur?f ‘particles,’ and signaled fifteen types of relations, the most frequent among which were conjunction, reason, and contrast. On average, NSs and NNSs produced comparable number of connectives per 100 words. At the clause and sentence levels, connectives organized main ideas and details within narration, description and argumentation. At the paragraph level, connectives mostly occurred in the NNS argumentative data, signaling a shift between larger text units. Salient similarities between the NSs and NNSs include the awareness of the polysemy of connectives, the diversity of connectives per text, the role of the 'zero' (i.e., no) connective to transition between main ideas within a paragraph, and the association between connectives and repetition at the morphological, word, and structural parallelism. Major differences were that, as a group, the NS participants drew connectives from a wider repertoire, produced less choppy clause and sentence transitions, and exhibited structural and pragmatic control over morphological and complex structural parallelism. The NNS group showed clear evidence of experimentation, especially when addressing the argumentative task. Findings from this study highlight the need to a reading-to-writing model in teaching connectives, encouraging TAFL teachers and curriculum designers to follow a multiliteracy approach rather than target each of the four language skills individually.

The current influx of online social network platforms and their ubiquitous presence in politics, business and various other domains has rapidly heightened the demand for social media literacy. For Arabic L2 learners, this entails attaining cultural competency and the appropriate skills to navigate not only varying non-standard forms of Arabic, but also internet jargon and slang terminology. While being social-media literate has become a real-world demand, the integration of social media competence into existing pedagogical frameworks lags greatly behind, and many L2 learners do not necessarily engage with social media in Arabic until well beyond the advanced level. Drawing on the Linguaculture and Critical Intercultural Literacies frameworks for integrating culture as an inseparable component to language teaching and learning (Agar 1994; Joukhadar 2016; Kern 2000; Pegrum 2008), the current study proposes a learning module designed for teaching social-media literacy in the Arabic classroom at the advanced level. The data is drawn from two advanced (third-year) Arabic classrooms at the University of Texas at Austin. A pre- and post-experiment survey was administered which measured the students’ experience with and confidence in using Arabic on social media. The main experiment was conducted on one of the two Arabic classes, and involved administering a series of 10-lesson modules allowing for in-depth analyses of the Arabic varieties used on social media (on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat). The students in the experimental classroom also engaged in writing in Arabic on these social media platforms on a weekly basis. The results from the experimental classroom undergoing the 10-lesson learning module on social media competency were compared with that of the control classroom, which participated in the pre- and post-experiment surveys but did not participate in the weekly learning modules. The results imply that attaining social media literacy is an integral part of attaining cultural competency, and that it is a skill that is not only teachable in the Arabic classroom, but an invaluable skill for the successful L2 learner in navigating various domains of the rapidly intensifying digital age.

This study examined the metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension strategies used by intermediate and advanced-level readers of Arabic as a second language enrolled in third and fourth year Arabic courses. The study compared the intermediate and advanced students’ perceived use of reading strategies to the actual strategy employed while reading a text in Arabic. The students’ perceived reading strategy profiles were quantitatively measured by administering a modified version of the Survey of Reading Strategies (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002; 44 participants total), which involved a self-reported measure. The actual reading strategies used were then measured using a think-aloud protocol with a portion of the original sample (18 participants total). Additionally, the study presents four qualitative case studies spanning profiles of both highly proficient and less proficient readers as determined by comprehension levels. The results indicate that the third and fourth year students both reported and used Problem-solving Strategies most often in regards to the three strategy categories presented in the Survey of Reading Strategies (henceforth SORS). The third year students had higher perceived and actual use of Support Strategies, whereas the fourth year students had higher perceived and actual use of Global Strategies. Overall, the fourth year students reported higher strategy usage on the SORS than the third year students, which contrasts the think-aloud protocols where the third year students employed reading strategies more frequently. Of the strategies used in the think aloud protocols, however, the fourth year students garnered a correct or partially correct meaning from their strategy usage in a higher percentage of the strategy instances than the third year students, suggesting that while they used fewer strategies, they were ultimately more skillful in their strategy usage. The results of this study are pertinent to the field of Second Language Acquisition in that they add to the small body of research on the perceived and actual strategy usage of L2 learners of Arabic. As traditional understandings of teaching literacy have not focused sufficiently on the degree to which effective strategy usage contributes to comprehension, the strategies demonstrated in this study are integral to redefining reading literacy in an evolving foreign language curriculum.