Teaching Arabic as a Global Language in U.S. K-12 Settings

This report, a recipient of QFI's Call for Research on Arabic as a Global Language, contributes to the growing body of research on Arabic language education by examining how K-12 Arabic teachers in the United States understand, teach, and navigate Arabic as a global language with multiple varieties. Focusing on teacher identity, critical language awareness, and the integration of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic, the study explores the readiness, experiences, and needs of Arabic teachers as they work to support students’ communicative and intercultural competence.

While a small but growing body of research has begun to examine the experiential, professional, and attitudinal predispositions that Arabic language teachers in U.S. K-12 contexts hold toward Arabic dialects and integrated teaching, this report builds on that work by asking the following overarching question:

How do different teacher identities and degrees of critical language awareness among Arabic language teachers in the United States help explain how they orient to MSA and dialects, how they endorse or question integration pedagogies, and how they negotiate the professional dynamics of implementing integration?

This report empirically addressed the topic in two parts: a survey of teachers of Arabic teaching across K-12 and higher education levels in the United States, and in-depth interviews with a subset of teachers working in U.S. K-12 contexts. The survey findings and interview evidence allowed for the following conclusions:

• Teachers of Arabic working in U.S. K-12 contexts are highly educated, multilingual, and fully qualified teachers who devote themselves to the teaching of Arabic and the education of their diverse students.
• While many teachers may still mostly teach MSA, many are also open and willing to use dialects in their classrooms.
• The size of the program and the kind of students they teach influence the degree to which a teacher will integrate dialects into MSA teaching.
• For nonnative-speaking teachers, self-confidence in their dialectal competence can be a factor. For native-speaking teachers, negative language ideologies can influence which dialects are included or excluded.
• Nativeness itself, however, is not a determining characteristic for whether a teacher will be receptive to integrated pedagogies.
• Three key reasons for dialect integration that teachers themselves see as meaningful are: to bond with and support their heritage students, to foster greater out-of-class communicative competence, and to cultivate a love for the Arab world and Arab culture.

Together, these findings help educators, researchers, teacher educators, and school leaders better understand the factors that shape Arabic teaching in U.S. K-12 classrooms. They also point to the importance of continued research and field support around teacher preparation, language variety, curriculum development, and effective Arabic instruction.

Learn more about this research project here.

Critical Language Awareness in Arabic Language Teaching: Five Modules for Professional Development

The findings from this study informed the design of five modules created for the purpose of educator development. The modules are designed for an audience of teachers of Arabic working with k-12 students (any context, any level).

Each module can be used alone. If you want to use them all, they are numbered one through five to suggest a beneficial sequence.