This paper examines the practical and technical aspects of implementing a collaborative platform for developing and managing Arabic Language curriculums. It examines some of the key benefits of creating such an environment along with some guidelines for successfully transitioning from traditional unmanaged scenarios. Arabic teachers are faced with an increasing demand for lessons based on authentic materials and suited to the needs and interests of their students. This demand is especially critical in advanced and special purpose courses that rely heavily on authentic content. Authentic content should fit into well-structured lessons and be supported with in-context grammar drills, vocabulary lists, and other activities that ensure that students have acquired the material and can use it in real-life scenarios. Working collaboratively on language curriculums is essential to meeting these challenges in terms of quality, production time, and accessibility. A viable collaboration platform ensures that the entire team in able to participate and contribute throughout the curriculum Lifecyle; that is from the early brainstorming stages to final lesson delivery and follow-up. A collaboration platform is a content management system that can support the roles and objectives of an Arabic curriculum design team: Teachers, teaching assistants, cultural coordinators. The platform allows team members to work together, share information, and quickly find relevant materials by subject, level, type or other criteria. Technically, collaboration platforms include features such as versioning, simultaneous editing, metadata tagging, linking, embedding, and workflows that help streamline the curriculum creation and management process. In addition, this paper looks at how to successfully plan a transition from the traditional single editor model found within many Arabic departments to a more open collaborative model and the considerations that need to be taken to ensure data privacy, intellectual property rights, and individual preferences. In conclusion, the paper defines the key roles needed within a department or organization such a content editors, designers, and approvers. Common scenarios will also be presented to demonstrate typical uses and showcase the value of collaboration.

Scholars deploy theories of discourse analysis as viable frameworks in multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and second language acquisition. Within these trends, the sociolinguistic nature of language has been emphasized mainly through analysis of oral language. Written texts have received less focus, although they provide a platform for analyzing properties of language in use. These texts typically involve dialogic processes that allow for interacting with potential readers and for projecting personal views and identities through explicit linguistic units or other discursive resources such as stance. Drawing on comparable data sets written by Arabic native speakers and advanced learners of Arabic, this study examines the properties of stance, which broadly refer to the ways in which ideas or people are evaluated in an interaction. Based on theories of discourse analysis and previous research on academic writing in other languages, this study investigates the discursive features of stance in Arabic academic essays. The study deconstructs the discursive qualities in these essays and illustrates the ways in which non-native Arabic writing displays discursive features of English. Of equal importance, the study shows that students’ essays, whether by native or non-native speakers, manifest dialogic features and interaction with potential readers, projecting certain identities through the use of particular discursive properties. Discussion of such properties advances our knowledge of Arabic academic writing and directs us towards areas of improvement in Arabic language teaching and learning. Identification of these features also allows learners of Arabic to understand the social identities they project and improve the quality of their writing.

Assessment of learners’ language ability, as noted by Chapelle and Voss (2016), is an important part of language education that has been affected by technology at least as significantly as language learning has. Although some teachers might resist using technology in their classrooms in general and in assessment in particular, others are encouraged due to the availability of specific tools that provide validity and reliability. According to Laborda (2007:8), “the benefits of online testing should overcome any of its drawbacks, as it can be faster, more efficient, and less costly than traditional paper-and-pencil testing.” One of the most friendly and effective tools in technology which can be used in assessment is "Socrative". Simply, one can run it on a laptop or a smartphone with internet access. Barnett (2013) defined Socrative as a web-based tool which allows teachers to post open-ended or multiple choice questions to their students who provide their answers immediately on the screen (to be seen by all students). So, teachers get immediate insight into students’ understanding of the assigned questions. According to Bruff (2013), teachers’ instruction might be adjusted towards students’ needs, if required. Therefore, this paper presents an overview of the use of Socrative in ASL classes in several activities for summative assessment (evaluating students' learning) and formative assessment (providing an ongoing feedback to monitor students' learning). An example of these activities is assessing students’ oral presentations. After each presentation, rubric questions (posted for students’ self and peer evaluation) are used for measuring the presentation skills, the content of the presentation, and the appropriate language used. Then, all students' answers and comments are shown anonymously on the screen to be discussed for future improvement. These answers would be captured by Socrative and delivered to teachers in a downloadable excel sheet which in turn will be sent to the presenter (student). In fact, the comparison between the use of Socrative and the traditional paper- and- pen in assessing this activity will be in favor for Socrative. Simply because the traditional tool requires spending hours analyzing the rubric answers, writing the analyzed data and finally sending them to the presenter without having a chance to discuss together the showed results on the screen. Thus, teachers’ choice of the appropriate tool of technology could not only save their time and effort, but also result in a more effective assessment of students’ performance.

Communicative language teaching has been a mainstay of second-and foreign-language acquisition methodology since the 1970s, and in the four decades since the introduction of CLT, methods and techniques for teaching grammar have changed radically. Along with CLT, new theories of second language acquisition (SLA) focused on the importance of the language acquisition that learners experience while they participate in meaning-focused activities in the classroom. Many studies have investigated the efficacy of focus-on-form grammar instruction, but few studies have undertaken the examination of preferences that teachers and learners have for focus-on-form instruction or for integrated instruction. The present study explores the preferences of Arabic instructors and learners for Integrated and Isolated Form-Focused Instruction. Participants are instructors presently teaching Arabic courses in American universities, and their students. Both groups will complete separate surveys eliciting their preferences regarding grammar teaching and instruction, to determine whether the groups have a preference for the isolated method of instruction wherein grammar is taught and studied separately, or for the integrated focus on form technique where grammar is integrated within the context of communicative activities. Many studies have shown that both types of instruction can be effective in the second-language classroom, the present study seeks to identify the preferences of two specific groups actively engaged in contemporary Arabic classrooms. This study addresses several research questions: What do teachers and learners perceive as the most effective way to balance isolated and form-focused instruction? In their view, which elements of grammar can be acquired without an explicit focus and which require a very focused approach? How do instructors view the teaching of metalinguistic information, and what do learners prefer in this regard? The survey will also query respondents about timing. When do instructors prefer to draw learners' attention to form-- before, after, or during communicative practice, and when do learners prefer to have their grasp of form monitored? The survey asks teachers about their use of corrective feedback; for example, do they stop a communicative activity to correct form, or permit learners to proceed uninterrupted? Alternatively, are there instances where learners may focus their attention wholly on the content of their utterances? Responses from the surveys will be analyzed to provide both quantitative and qualitative data that instructors can use to inform their own teaching methodology and curricula and create a learning environment that takes into account learner preferences for acquisition of specific elements of Arabic grammar.

Research in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has shown that language learners’ production of speech acts in L2 is influenced by pragmatic transfer from L1 (Beebe et al. 1990; Blum-Kulka 1982; Maeshiba et al. 1996; Trosborg 1987). Researchers trying to understand this phenomenon have examined a number of factors that affect transfer from L1. One such factor that has received considerable attention is learners’ L2 language proficiency, specifically: whether there is a positive or negative correlation between pragmatic transfer and proficiency. However, research findings of this line of research have been inconsistent and often contradictory. While some studies have reported positive correlation between pragmatic transfer and proficiency (Allami and Naeimi 2011; Beebe et al. 1990; Blum-Kulka 1982; Hill 1997; Keshavarz et al. 2006; Kwon 2003; Takahashi and Beebe 1987), others have reported the opposite tendency (Bu 2012; Maeshiba et al. 1996; Phoocharoensil 2012; Ramos 1991; Ren and Gao 2012; Shardakova 2005; Takahashi and DuFon 1989; Tamanaha 2003). The present study aimed to contribute to this line of research by investigating the relationship between pragmatic transfer and proficiency among a group of language learners never previously examined in ILP research: American learners of Arabic. The study focused on the speech act of refusal as realized by American learners of Arabic in Egyptian Arabic. Twenty American learners of Arabic (10 intermediate and 10 advanced), and two baseline groups (10 native speakers of Egyptian Arabic and 10 native speakers of American English) participated in the study. Data were collected using enhanced open-ended role-plays (Billmyer and Varghese 2000), which consisted of 6 situations eliciting refusals of requests and offers in lower, equal, and higher status situations. Results showed that both learner groups engaged in negative pragmatic transfer from English with regard to the overall frequency of direct and indirect strategies, individual strategy use, strategy use relative to status, and discourse-level features. The findings also showed that the intermediate learners engaged in negative pragmatic transfer more frequently than their advanced counterparts. The findings, therefore, provide support for negative correlation between pragmatic transfer and language proficiency. The present study has made methodological improvements on Arabic speech act research by eliciting refusals orally, which is particularly crucial in a diglossic language such as Arabic. In addition, it employed the role-play method for data collection, which allowed for eliciting interactional multi-turn data, and made it possible to analyze refusals and examine transfer at the discourse level.