Arabic-L:K-16:Arabic Teacher Training Response

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 15 Dec 2006
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Arabic Teacher Training Response

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1)
Date: 15 Dec 2006
From: "Dora Johnson" <dora at cal.org>
Subject:Arabic Teacher Training Response

Most of the Arabic teacher training takes place during the summer, and
there aren't very many of those. Two organizations that do have teacher
training institutes are the National Capital Language Resource Center
(www.nclrc.org) and the National Middle East Resource Center
(www.nmelrc.org). Thanks to U.S. government funding, there will be more
teacher training opportunities in the summer of 2007 but information
about them will most likely not be available until sometime in February.

Overseas, there have been trainings and curriculum development through
the private schools. The Near East South Asia Council of Overseas
Schools (www.nesacenter.org) just held its winter workshop. I'm pretty
sure that these workshops are available only to the member schools, but
there are teachers who have been involved in training for some time now
and they may be available as resources in the summer. I don't know
enough about this, but if you are interested, I can send you the name of
the person who has been doing the training, but would prefer to do that
offline, so please write to me directly and I will put you in touch with
her.

Regarding curriculum and materials, this is still a bit of a wasteland.
There is one curriculum with materials for K-3 available through the
Bureau of Islamic and Arabic Educatioin
(www.biae.net/Arabic%20storybooks%20flyer.pdf). There are some curricula
for high schools but the materials are not necessarily well-developed.
High schools mostly use one of two main texts that were published here
in the U.S. For other materials, teachers depend on materials they adapt
from books overseas or they develop their own for use in their
classrooms. There are two textbooks that were developed for middle
school students in Dearborn, Michigan. Another popular series is Uhibbu
al-`Arabiyyah which was developed in the Gulf which teachers tend to
like because the volumes were developed with children whose will be
learning Arabic as a foreign language. These volumes are entirely in
Arabic. Hopefully, this stituation will change in the next couple of
years and there will be more choices.

Finally, I believe there is a teaching Arabic as a foreign language
training course offered by the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
Unfortunately, I do not have a contact there, but you could try
contacting the Arabic department.

Dora Johnson
Program Associate
Center for Applied Linguistics
4646 40th Street, NW
Washington, DC  20016-1859
Telephone: 202-362-0700
Fax: 202-363-7204
E-mail: dora at cal.org
Web site: www.cal.org


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