Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) in the United States has been growing, particularly after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In this regard, Taha (2007), for instance, mentioned that the “National Security Language Initiative” was initiated in January 2006, and aimed at encouraging American students to learn “critical-need” foreign languages, including Arabic. Several Arabic textbooks were composed to meet the demands of this new growth. However, in comparison to textbooks available in the USA for other long-established modern languages, such as French, Spanish, and German, these Arabic textbooks arguably possess some inherent weaknesses. For instance, they often lack integration of communicative activities, visual aids, and pop culture artifacts, among other things. Further, they lack a clear vision of where to place students in accordance with standards set in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2012), whose scale has four main levels (Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior). To partly address these shortcomings in current Arabic textbooks, this contribution aims to shed light on both benefits and limitations of using comics and political cartoons which are presently largely absent from relevant materials. It is argued here that strategic integration of such pop cultural forms as visual aids in Arabic textbooks will (i) motivate students towards the subject matter, (ii) provide authentic contexts to teach history, colloquial Arabic, and culture, and (iii) improve students’ writing and speaking in Arabic. Within the larger picture, this study will look at how comics and political cartoons can provide opportunities for students to improve their proficiency with regard to Arabic language and culture, and how these forms of pop culture can enhance students’ level of motivation and develop their multiliteracy skills. Relevant activities will be illustrated based on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines as well as on students’ levels of proficiency. Tis contribution will also address how AFL teachers can utilize these cultural artifacts in teaching their students Arabic language and culture in an integrated way, and how they can develop students’ multimodal and critical skills. Works Cited Taha, T. A. (2007). Arabic as “A Critical-Need” foreign language in post-9/11 era: A study of students’ attitudes and motivation. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 34(3), 150–160.

The study investigates the use of cultural expressions that stem from a religious background in the international franchise TV talent show that is adapted to the pan-Arab audience, The Voice, ʾAhlā Ṣōt. The researchers are interested to trace and index the use and function of these expressions, if any. The research questions that the study answers are: 1. Which references to God are used in the Arab Voice 2014 edition; what are their frequencies and who uses what references and how many times? 2. How can we interpret the use of these references in the Arab version of the Voice? The data on which this article is built come from a PhD project on the ways in which actors in the Arab Voice, edition 2014, communicate with each other given the fact that they speak different Arabic dialects that can differ considerably from each other. Numerous communication instances are analyzed, focusing on diverse sociolinguistic aspects of the communication. In the present contribution, we focus on the use of references to God in the show, a subject that is not tackled in the thesis and therefore unique for the paper. The analysis focuses on the second edition of the show broadcast in 2014, more in particular on the four members of the jury and the three presenters of the show. We explicitly make use of the gloss ‘references to God’ and not ‘religious references’ as that would imply that the use of such references is inspired by religious convictions of the users. The results index normalcy of the use of these expressions. In agreement with Versteegh (2020), the use of these expressions does not make Arabic an Islamic language. However, these expressions are used to carry out specific functions in the communication, such as amazement, praise, humor, gratitude, and more. Although the study finds out that these expressions are part of a shared repertoire among Arabs from different countries, there might be a reservation to use these expressions due to the specific nature of certain nationalities.

Within relevance-theoretic approaches, pragmatists have recently discovered a phenomenon known as unarticulated constituents (Recanati, 2002, Carston, 2002), the absence of certain linguistic elements that have truth-conditional effects on the proposition at the level of what is said. Any interpretation of the proposition necessitates pragmatic processes known as completion and expansion (Bach, 1994) or saturation and enrichment (Recanati, 2002) to recover the communicated meaning contextually. The following examples illustrate these processes better: I’ve had a very large breakfast (today) You’re not going to die (from that cut) ((Recanati, 2002, pp. 300-301). The unarticulated constituent in example (1) is ‘today’, while in the second is ‘from that cut’. Unarticulated constituents are part of a broader debate between semantics and pragmatics known as semantic underdeterminacy. Medieval Islamic legal texts are replete with copious discussions that correspond to the notion of unarticulated constituents which have produced different understandings. In consequence, those deferring understandings have led to different and even contrasting Sharia laws. This paper aims at comparing medieval Islamic jurists’ studies of unarticulated constituents to that of modern pragmatics. Based on Islamic jurists’ analyses, the paper will make two arguments. On the one hand, these pragmatic processes are seemingly called for only when they have truth-conditional effects on the proposition. This means that the recovery of unarticulated constituents may modify the intended meaning by means of disambiguation. However, disambiguation is not always the case. The paper will show evidence from what is known as ‘ʾalʾiṭla:q wa ltaqīīd’ in Islamic jurisprudence that eliminating an object (or transforming a transitive verb to an intransitive one) as an instance of unarticulated constituents would lead to a different interpretation and consequently cause a different legal outcome. On the other hand, the mechanism by which the recovery is achieved has always been questionable and argumentative. Theoretically, these discussions may constitute valid grounds for reexamining and seriously questioning a number of relevant aspects of the notion of unarticulated constituents in modern pragmatics as follows: When and on what basis should these unarticulated constituents be recovered from the context? How can a decision be taken to recover an appropriate constituent among a wide range of possible candidates? What is the source of the recovery? Typical (lay) readers or professionals (jurists/ linguists/philosophers)? The results suggest that those pragmatic processes need to be either reconceptualized or studied more carefully.

This presentation explores the connection between language ideologies and identities negotiated in the context of teaching and learning English as a foreign language in private language institutes in Iran. Taking the approach that language ideologies are beliefs about languages as articulated by the speakers (Silverstein, 1979: 193), I turn to Irvine (1989) and Kroskrity (2000) to include ‘ideology as doxa’ to also unpack those aspects of ideology that do not usually rise to discursive consciousness in different individuals. Utilizing the combination of explicit and implicit representations of language ideologies, this research explores how Iranian teachers perceive speaking English in situations where they might as well choose Farsi, i.e. when they are not in classroom contexts. Based on participant observation and interviews from private language schools in Mashhad, Iran, I argue that understanding English language teachers’ values their language ideologies was made possible by considering arbitrariness and social constructed-ness of the values that underlie their inclinations towards each language ideology. In line with the literature on language ideologies and identity construction, the findings of this study confirm the arbitrariness of placing such variables as classiness and categorizations of naevus riche vs. being learned or well educatedness both on choices of English and Farsi. Claiming and positioning other teachers with religious/non-religious identities, classiness, accents and intonations of certain Hollywood actors, similarity to certain American or British politicians, BBC or CNN standards of pronunciation and accent variations, or owning ones very own Farsi undertones and accents are among the identity negotiations of the English language teacher participants in this study. Some of the participants in the interviews would boast on how they never sound Persian and everyone thinks they listen to native speakers when they are heard, and others negotiate that certain teachers are in denial of their very Persian accents, especially when they try to sound like native speakers. Bourdieu (1977:164) argues that social groups produce arbitrary modes of thinking and acting and social structures. Informed by this element of arbitrariness of promotion of certain language ideologies, I conclude that choices of languages as modes of communication and variations of English among language teachers on this study happens based on interests of certain social, political and groups who negotiate respective identities.

Although Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has three different interdental fricatives /θ/, /ð/, and the emphatic interdental /ðˤ/, most Egyptian Arabic (EA) speakers do not pronounce these interdental fricative sounds in MSA, and instead substitute them with the sibilant /s/ and /z/, respectively (Schmidt, 1987). The factors which influence the pronunciation of interdentals by EA speakers vary from one study to another. For instance, Ahmed Ali (2014) and El Zarka (2013) refer to dialect interference in the second language acquisition of phonology, while other studies indicate some sociolinguistic variables such as a socioeconomic background variable (Labov, 1970) or a stylistic variable (Schmidt, 1987) as influencing the EA speakers’ pronunciation of interdental fricatives. This study examines the interdentals of 16 Egyptian Arabic speakers through an interview and several tasks, including reading samples, in order to determine which variables (e.g., phonological, sociolinguistic, or stylistic) are the most salient in the acquisition of interdentals in MSA. In addition, this study tests several new variables (the effect of pronunciation teaching and formality of the topic) that may influence the EA speakers’ pronunciation of interdentals. Learning how to read the Qur’an has a great influence on the participants’ reading as well. The collected data also supports the same results in reading the interdentals in English as a second language. Through analysis of the collected data, this study demonstrates that the pronunciation of interdentals by EA speakers is in fact due to a combination of these factors.