Teaching culture in the Arabic classroom gives rise to the question of how cultural learning can be effectively facilitated through the Arabic language. Arabic, having two different varieties that are used in different social contexts, presents a set of additional language requirements in understanding Arab culture. It is important to explore how this issue affects the way culture is communicated and learned in the Arabic classroom. When we consider Arabic as a diglossic language in the academic setting, we observe that Modern Standard Arabic, as a variety used exclusively in formal domains, is what is taught in almost all the Arabic programs in the United States. Colloquial Arabic, by contrast, is used for everyday communication and is rarely taught in the classroom. If offered, Colloquial Arabic is introduced only in a separate course for students who already have an advanced level proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic. Diglossia presents difficulties in teaching Arab culture when only one Arabic variety is used in the classroom. Since the materials used in teaching culture include plenty of Colloquial Arabic content to show how Arab culture works, it is within reason to argue that students need proficiencies in both Arabic varieties in order to learn the culture and its manifestations. Based on this, I will study the role of Colloquial Arabic in teaching and studying culture, and I will argue that it is required to facilitate the learning of culture effectively and authentically. This paper will present research on Arabic instruction at the Arabic program and Arabic Summer Institute at The University of Texas at Austin with a primary focus on how Colloquial Arabic is used in teaching culture starting the novice level. Data will be drawn from classroom observations and interviews with Arabic students that have no previous experience in Colloquial Arabic before joining the UT Arabic Summer Institute in order to study their perspective about the role of Colloquial Arabic in learning culture in the classroom.

Over the past fifty years or so, the teaching of culture in the language classroom has drawn growing awareness and interest on the part of administrators, teachers and students alike. While very significant milestones have been reached through the creation of curricula and standards that emphasize culture not as the fifth language skill but rather as an intrinsic part of language itself, there still exists no real consensus on what it means to teach culture, due in great part to the all-encompassing nature of the very concept of culture. This absence of clear boundaries offers language teachers the perfect opportunity for creativity and experimenting. The present pilot study is an attempt to create a novel framework to the teaching and learning of culture in the Arabic language classroom. While the teaching of culture should not be equated to the teaching of mere facts about the target culture, it remains true that students still need to be knowledgeable about a "basic repertoire of information necessary for the comprehension of most cultural concepts" (Lafayette 1988). The idea behind this study is to establish what this basic repertoire could look like for the foreign student of Arabic. A questionnaire of eight open-ended questions was created and administered to 30 Arabs, asking them about some of the most significant cultural events or memories in their personal life. Topics varied from literature and arts, to sports, politics and pop culture. The results of the survey were analyzed and categorized, thus creating a pool of cultural data that represents multiple voices and experiences. This study presents the survey results as well as a lesson plan for the Arabic language classroom based on some of the data gathered. The most novel aspect of this study is the data selection method: the data pool came directly from the participants, instead of being imposed by a single scholar. Also, while it offers insights into facts and artifacts about Arab culture(s) (knowing about), it also includes personal stories that illustrate broader attitudes and belief systems (knowing why), thus anchoring impersonal information into the human experience. In addition, this study attempts to define some of the possible constants of Arab culture, those aspects of the collective memory that were most salient in the participants' minds.

How do you pack a lifetime of knowledge of Culture/culture(s) into Classes? Edward Hall (1959) defined culture as the following “culture is communication and communication is culture” .Even though such a statement may seem limited and too definitive, yet it does show the crucial importance of the role of culture within communication. Since one of the major aims in teaching Arabic is to ensure that learners of the language are able to communicate within various given contexts, and to facilitate intercultural communication, thus the teaching of culture becomes of paramount importance. The question posed above is daunting to say the least and is one of the major challenges in the field of teaching Arabic to non-native speakers. The challenge is confounded when bearing in mind that there are many culture(s) - by cultures here it is meant behaviours, beliefs, popular culture, values, identity politics, religion(s), ideas and how they are manifested in language- within each society, and thus we should be aware of presenting a nuanced approach that accounts for socio-economic, geographical factors and the dynamism of culture rather than making generalizing pronouncements, while acknowledging that to help educators in the field standards and guidelines have to be given to help the students reach a higher level of cultural proficiency. While some in the field have called for the teaching of culture(s) as a separate syllabus, interweaving the cultural aspects within various syllabi is the approach that will be discussed during this session due to the belief that this approach offers more diversity and room for a nuanced perspective, and since language and culture are often inseparable thus it allows the learners to receive the information in context(s). On teaching culture(s) through the syllabi, there will be four main focal points: social interactions and the accompanying language/gestures used with them and how this differs from one social context to another; the appropriate form of language usuage in Said Badawi’s continuum bearing in mind aspects such as power dynamics, gender, and urban/rural settings; particular occasions and their social and cultural significance; and finally ideas/terms/ items from popular culture that have had a lasting effect on the collective consciousness of many of society’s strata. In the session, a focus on ECA and Egyptian Cinema in particular will take place with the showing of samples from these designed syllabi to illustrate the teaching of culture with its different aspects interweaved within the units.