Decolonizing the Classroom

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Erin Twohig
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Foreign Teachers ◽  
Standard Arabic

The second chapter examines novels that cast Arabization as a new colonialism: both by arguing that Standard Arabic was a “foreign” language in Algeria, and by discussing foreign teachers as a colonizing force bent on shaping a multilingual Algerian people into an “Arab” nation. Karima Berger’s l’Enfant des deux mondes (The child of two worlds) argues that studying Arabic after independence made her French-educated protagonist feel like a colonial subject in her own country. Haydar Haydar’s Walimah li-aʻshaab al-bahr (A banquet for seaweed), written by a Syrian who taught in Algeria in the 1970s, tells the story of a young Iraqi teacher who falls in love with an Algerian student, and must fight society’s impression that he is a sexually “colonizing” threat. Despite different approaches, both novels use colonialism as a metaphor to understand Algeria’s assumed “otherness” to the Arab world. This otherness is reflected, and indeed reproduced, in official textbooks, which often present modern Algerian literature as the lesser other of metropolitan French or Middle Eastern canons. This chapter explores the problems and limits of the colonial as metaphor, along with pedagogical theories of “decolonizing the classroom.”

scholarly journals Addressing Religious Diversity through Children’s Literature: An “English as a Foreign Language” Classroom in Israel

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rawia Hayik
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Practitioner Inquiry ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
Region I ◽  
Language Classroom ◽  
Efl Students

Conflicts between different religious groups occasionally arise in my Christian and Muslim Israeli-Arab EFL students’ school and area. In an attempt to increase students’ knowledge of and respect for other faiths in the region, I conducted practitioner inquiry research in my religiously diverse Middle-Eastern classroom. Grounded in critical literacy, I used a book set of religion-based literature alongside critical literacy engagements to effect some change in students’ tolerance towards other faiths. This article describes my journey of exploring students’ reader responses to religion-based texts and issues.

scholarly journals Whole-Part-Whole Reading Instruction in the Teaching and Learning of Arabic as a Foreign Language at Beginner Level

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Facchin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Reading Instruction ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Theoretical Reasoning ◽  
Modern Standard

The neurological bimodality theory, espousing the principles of directionality and cerebral hemisphericity, has led to a series of expedients in the field of foreign language teaching, like the use of inductive strategies. Accordingly, this contribution focuses on a methodological proposal stemming from the aforementioned theoretical perspectives and tackles the question of reading in the early phase of Arabic as Foreign Language learning. In doing so it questions how to teach Modern Standard Arabic at beginner level and proposes solutions to it through the use of new technological tools in the service of languages. Specifically, the focus is set on Pre-A1 and A1 levels of the recently issued Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. As a result of theoretical reasoning, the ‘Whole-Part-Whole’ method teaching philosophy is presented, theorized and verified in relation to the study of Arabic by non-Arab beginner learners.

scholarly journals Speech Recognition of Moroccan Dialect Using Hidden Markov Models

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mouaz Bezoui
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Euclidean Distance ◽  
Speaker Identification ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Training Session ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Identification System ◽  
Training Phase ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Testing Phase

<p>This paper addresses the development of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for the Moroccan Dialect. Dialectal Arabic (DA) refers to the day-to-day vernaculars spoken in the Arab world. In fact, Moroccan Dialect is very different from the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) because it is highly influenced by the French Language. It is observed throughout all Arab countries that standard Arabic widely written and used for official speech, news papers, public administration and school but not used in everyday conversation and dialect is widely spoken in everyday life but almost never written. we propose to use the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features to specify the best speaker identification system. The extracted speech features are quantized to a number of centroids using vector quantization algorithm. These centroids constitute the codebook of that speaker. MFCC’s are calculated in training phase and again in testing phase. Speakers uttered same words once in a training session and once in a testing session later. The Euclidean distance between the MFCC’s of each speaker in training phase to the centroids of individual speaker in testing phase is measured and the speaker is identified according to the minimum Euclidean distance. The code is developed in the MATLAB environment and performs the identification satisfactorily.</p>

scholarly journals Watching the war against Iraq through pan-Arab satellite TV

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed El-Bendary
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Al Jazeera ◽  
The West ◽  
Satellite Television ◽  
The North ◽  
Satellite Channels ◽  
Flow Of Information

It was the first Gulf War in 1991 which led to the satellite television explosion in the Arab world. Arabs then knew about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait through CNN. Today, Arab satellite channels reach almost every Arab capital and many Middle Eastern and African nations — from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Iran in the east, from Syria in the north to Djibouti in the south. This battle for the airwaves and boom in satellite channels in the Arab world has become both a tool for integration and dispersion. It is raising a glimpse of hope that the flow of information will no longer be pouring from the West to the East, but from the East to the West. Questions, however, remain about the credibility of news coverage by Arabic networks like the maverick Qatar-based al-Jazeera and whether Arab journalists adhere to journalistic norms upheld in the West.

Post-Islamism in Distress? A Critical Evaluation of the Theory in Islamist-Dominated Egypt (11 February 2011-3 July 2013)

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Robbert A.F.L. Woltering
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Tunisian Revolution

The developments in the Arab world since the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution not only open up new horizons for Arab citizens, they also allow for scholars of Middle Eastern studies to test certain theories in ways heretofore impossible. One such theory is that of post-Islamism. This paper discusses a number of recent publications by former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of recent developments in and analysis of Egypt’s Islamist politics, with the aim of determining whether it is possible (and useful) to speak of a ‘post-Islamist condition’ in the post-Mubarak period wherein the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power. 


A Dimension Reduction Method Application to a Political Science Question: Using Exploratory Factor Analysis to Generate the Dimensionality of Political Ideology in the Arab World

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 2040002
Author(s):  
Malek Abduljaber
Keyword(s):  
Dimension Reduction ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Stable Solution ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Arab Politics ◽  
Science Question ◽  
Islam And Secularism ◽  
Mass Level

This paper utilises data dimension reduction to settle a heavily debated question concerning the dimensionality of political ideology in the Arab World. It relies on recent data available through the World Values Survey to generate a stable solution for the number of important and exciting dimensions defining ordinary citizens’ political attitude structures. The findings of the analysis suggest that in four Arab states, political ideology is multi-dimensional on the mass level. This negates the widespread assumption made about Arab politics where Islam and secularism constitute the only dimension organising voters’ attitudes and behaviours. This is important because many analyses of Middle Eastern politics start with this assumption without questioning its validity. Further, models of political ideology are to be modified when transferred to studying Middle Eastern political attitudes. The single-dimension hypothesis applicable in some Western settings is not attainable in the Arab World.

Shaping an agenda through experience(s)

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-134
Author(s):  
William Grabe
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Peace Corps ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Summer Vacation ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Efl Teacher ◽  
Young Teacher ◽  
Senior Students ◽  
Modern Standard

After finishing a B.A. degree in History and Political Sciences from Valparaiso University, I began my post-undergraduate life going into the U. S. Peace Corps and spending three years as an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher in lycees in Morocco. After all, in 1973, agreeing to a free summer vacation in Morocco for Peace Corps training, if nothing else, seemed like a good deal. Little did I know that an EFL/ESL (English as a second language)/applied linguistics life would begin at that point. I did learn that I liked teaching (which surprised me a bit) and the opportunities for creativity it provided (even if teaching with ‘Martin and Jillian’ (Broughton 1968) and First things first (Alexander 1972) (for those who remember). As a young teacher, I vividly remember, as a break from the routine, teaching my senior students the lyrics to ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ first the Bob Dylan version, then the Jimi Hendricks version. Sometimes we just have to take some chances. Morocco was also a great place to be in the middle of multilingualism in action: Moroccan Arabic, Berber, Modern Standard Arabic, French, Spanish, and English. For many of my students, English was their fifth language.

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