Theme 5

Arabic Programs
Goals, Design and Curriculum

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 David Wilmsen
Arabic as a Foreign Language at AUB

10
Arabic as a Foreign
Language at AUB
History and Current Trends

David Wilmsen

The teaching of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) at the American University of Beirut (AUB)
began in the early 1920s, when the young Anis Frayḥa took up a position as adjunct professor in the
Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages and began teaching new American faculty mem-
bers and their wives Lebanese colloquial Arabic (Kozah, 2016, p. 282). AFL at AUB thus predates Ara-
bic study-abroad programs at other Western institutions, having begun some two decades before the
foundation of the famous (or infamous) British institution the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies
(MECAS) in 1944, for most of its existence, calling the village of Shemlan in the Chouf Mountains
above Beirut its home (Craig, 1998), and 38 years before that of its more illustrious counterpart, the
Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (the CASA programme), established in Cairo in 1967 (McCarus,
1992, p. 214).1
Both MECAS and CASA were formed in response to world events. The former during the final
year of WWII and the latter after the events of the naksa, or “setback”, as the so-called Six-Day
War is called in Arabic. For its part, MECAS closed its doors in 1978 when a combination of UK
government budget austerity and the increasingly uncertain security situation attendant upon the
Lebanese Civil War finally made its position untenable (Craig, 1998: ch. 7, especially 107–108). The
same can also be said in part about the most current manifestation of Arabic-as-foreign-language
study at AUB: The program that began in the early 20th century withered away in the middle 1970s
of the same century, when Beirut came to be seen as too dangerous as a study-abroad destination.
The current program, housed jointly between the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Lan-
guages and the Center for Arabic and Middle East Studies (CAMES), revived after the events of 11
September 2001. The shock of those events motivated the United States government to play one
of its generational games of catch-up, reversing a decades-long trend in diminishing federal funding
for Arabic language instruction, hoping in a short time to build a cadre of specialists proficient in
Arabic. American university students, recognizing the career advantage in studying the language and
in gaining area experience, began to seek study-abroad opportunities, flouting travel advisories to
come to Beirut.
A decade later, events continued to work their effect on the program. When, following the Arab
uprisings, which began in Tunisia in late 2010, breaking out in Egypt and Yemen in January 2011,
Libya and Bahrain in February of the same year, and Syria a month later, other popular Arabic
study-abroad destinations, notably the CASA programs in Cairo and its newly established center in
Damascus came to be deemed too risky, some students at those two centres opted to complete their

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study-abroad programs at AUB, Lebanon at the time being described as an “island of stability in the
region”.2 The subsequent deterioration of conditions in neighbouring Syria in the five years since,
its effects occasionally spilling over into Lebanon, continues to affect the program at AUB, notably
in enrolments, with numbers of students from the United States dropping, especially after incidents,
with those from Europe remaining constant or rising slightly, the overall effect resulting in smaller
class sizes.3 Regardless, students continue choosing to come to Beirut to study Arabic. And, despite
regional events, it remains in some respects an ideal environment for the Arabic study-abroad experi-
ence. We shall return to consider how that may be presently. Before we do, let us first examine AFL
programs at AUB as they are currently configured.

Arabic@AUB
Celebrating its 15th year at the same time that AUB celebrates its 150th, the AFL program comprises
two separate approaches to the study-abroad experience. During the fall and spring semesters, most
of the AFL students at AUB come as semester-abroad or year-abroad students who study Arabic
as part of their broader curricular requirements. Another contingent comprises graduate students
pursuing master’s degrees in Middle East Studies at CAMES. These students are also studying Arabic
along with other curricular requirements. This means that the Arabic classes during the academic
year cannot be intensive, Arabic language classes being but one of the stars in the curricular constel-
lation of a normal academic year. Classes in the Arabic of reading and writing, that is to say what is
somewhat inaccurately called Modern Standard Arabic (or MSA), meet for five hours per week at
the beginning and intermediate levels, three hours at the advanced. Spoken Lebanese Arabic is taught
in separate classes, also meeting for three to five hours a week. Classes at each level are coordinated
such that students, if they are able and wish to, may enrol in both without encountering a schedul-
ing conflict. Those enrolling in both spoken Lebanese and MSA sections would thus be spending
six to ten hours a week in Arabic class. In other words, a full curriculum of Arabic classes during the
academic year grants a respectable amount of Arabic study, but it is not intensive. An added attraction
is that students completing Arabic classes at the high advanced level may then join classes in the Ara-
bic literature curriculum, the classes of which, taught in Arabic, are intended for Lebanese students,
including majors and minors in Arabic. This is the highest desideratum of study-abroad instruction,
not often achieved elsewhere: university classes intended for native speakers of the language open to
AFL students. Some instructors of those classes have noted that these nonnative speakers of the lan-
guage perform at a higher level of reading and writing proficiency than do their Lebanese classmates.
The study-abroad students themselves admit to encountering difficulty in the aural component of
the class, that is, in comprehending the lectures and in participating fully in class in the target lan-
guage. We shall consider why that may be further on.
For its part, the CAMES summer Arabic program is intensive, with an hour and a half each day
of Lebanese-spoken Arabic and another four and a half hours devoted to the Arabic of reading and
writing. In 2013, the summer program initiated an intensive Lebanese Arabic track that meets for
four hours a day throughout the six-week summer term. Students enrolling in that track pursue
intensive study of colloquial Arabic alone.
As a specialized intensive summer program, CAMES is able to fine-tune the proficiency levels
of its classes, often distributing students over nine separate levels, from the absolute novice to the
superior in both the MSA and spoken Lebanese classes. The summer program attempts to limit class
sizes to 12 students at most, with many classes hovering round a desirable six or seven students in a
classroom facilitated by two instructors, most being native speakers of Lebanese Arabic. From year to
year, the larger classes fluctuate in size usually between the beginning and intermediate levels, with
the numbers tapering off into the advanced levels.

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A final consideration is that throughout the year, AUB hosts a large influx of heritage learners—
students of Lebanese or Arab background—pursuing study abroad, some wishing to improve their
command of the dialect of their parents and in-country relatives and others hoping to enhance their
command of the language of writing. The summer program especially accommodates the particu-
lar needs of these students, often opening sections devoted to heritage students alone. Otherwise,
teaching heritage language students either aspect of their language of heritage remains a largely
unaddressed and growing matter of concern. It is felt especially keenly in Lebanon with the large
Lebanese diaspora—some estimates placing the numbers of Lebanese living abroad at three times
their numbers in the home country. Those visiting home in the summer reach one-and-a-half times
the local population of about four million souls. A large cohort of the younger generation of those
expatriate Lebanese come to AUB (and other Lebanese universities) for an education, some of them
taking that opportunity to study their heritage language as well.The needs of these heritage students
itself bring the curricular tasks of the study-abroad Arabic experience into sharp focus.

Curricular Matters
The teaching of Arabic as a foreign language in Western institutions abroad began as a practical
matter at AUB, with the teaching of a spoken variety of Arabic to learners who needed to use the
language in their daily lives and not with what was later to become the default position at Ameri-
can institutions: that of teaching the formal language of writing and public address.4 This does not
mean that the formal Arabic of writing was given short shrift at AUB. To the contrary, throughout
his career as a Semitist and Arabist, Anis Frayḥa remained an advocate for that variety of Arabic,
especially in the education of students at educational institutions in the Arabophone world (Frayḥa,
1980). Curiously, almost 90 years after the implementation of Lebanese Arabic language instruction
at AUB, “teaching of spoken Arabic remains a contested area of curriculum, as well as an important
one” (Ryding, 2013, p. 177) throughout the profession, if less controversial at AUB.
The almost exclusive pedagogical emphasis on the Arabic of writing is a later accretion in the 20th-
century era of teaching of Arabic as a foreign language, especially in the approach taken in the United
States and, by extension, the study-abroad programs toward which students from stateside institutions
gravitate. The default toward the written language appears to date to 1965 and 1966, when a series of
Arabic teachers workshops began to address the need for a new set of teaching materials, the partici-
pants all agreeing that “it is practically and methodologically sound for all students of Arabic to begin
their training with MSA” (McCarus, 1992, p. 212). Five years later, that approach had gained the field:

There [was] a gradual change in the practice of the various institutions. In the aftermath of the
forties, when great emphasis was placed on the learner first speaking and understanding and
only later reading and writing, several institutions offered the colloquial first.This seems to have
been largely abandoned; many now begin with MSA and only later, if at all, offer a colloquial.
(Abboud, 1971, p. 5)

Summer and study-abroad programs were obliged to follow suit, with the result that the CASA
program, the precursor of which had been set up as a summer institute for the teaching of spoken
Egyptian Arabic in Cairo by Portland State (McCarus, 1992, p. 214), concentrated almost entirely
upon MSA, not returning to an equal commitment to teaching spoken Arabic until some time after
1987. A history of host institution the American University in Cairo published that year defines
the focus of the program as then constituted: “the study of Arabic as used by educated Egyptians in
conversation and writing, supplemented by work in newspaper and classical Arabic” (Murphy, 1987,
p. 256).5 Later programs, such as the Middlebury summer Arabic program (founded in 1968) and

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others adopted a fush·ā-only approach from the beginning, sometimes going so far as to require their
˙
students to engage in all activities—imagine meeting and falling in love—in that artificial register
(Allen, 1992, pp. 230–232). Even study-abroad programs purporting to provide students with train-
ing in the dialect did so in a half-hearted manner, the Virginia/Yarmouk summer program in Jordan,
for example, at the time, offering the local dialect of the host country as an afternoon option a few
hours a week. The reason for this must have been that students at these programs were expected to
articulate with the curriculum upon return to their home institutions, many, perhaps most, of which
did not offer any Arabic dialect at all.
The implicit assumptions behind the default approach adopted at many if not most US universi-
ties from the latter half of the last century appears to be that students of the Arabic of reading and
writing must wait until they travel abroad to polish off their educations by learning to speak Arabic as
its native speakers do.Writing specifically about the CASA program, Allen illuminates the difficulties
inherent in such an arrangement. His words could apply equally to any Arabic study-abroad program:

It is difficult to plan the curriculum and organize goals for a program . . . when many of the US
programs that send their students [abroad] desire only a “finishing school” to produce “native
readers.” For such a clientele, any skill in a spoken dialect . . . is a purely tangential benefit. For
other US programs of Arabic, [study abroad] represents a crucial opportunity to develop all skills
[that is, especially listening and speaking in a local vernacular] of the language.
(Allen, 1992, p. 231)

What this means is that home institutions were either unconcerned that their students gain facility in
spoken Arabic or that they relied upon study abroad to round out their students’ language education.
The effect has been long lasting, such that even today when studying Arabic abroad, students
often spend all or most of their time concentrating upon the skills of reading and writing, with some
universities reluctant to grant credit for anything but classes in the Arabic of writing. This is as true
at AUB as it is anywhere else. Some students of Arabic as a foreign language spending a semester or
two abroad at AUB are required by their home institutions to register in MSA classes, meaning that
they will often have no time in a crowded schedule to enrol in a spoken Lebanese Arabic class, losing
what will be for some their only, for others perhaps only their first, opportunity to learn an Arabic
vernacular in its living milieu.
The practical limitation that this approach inflicts upon students becomes painfully obvious in
their study abroad, especially at the advanced to superior levels. Despite their having attained highly
advanced proficiency in the formal registers of writing, they are incapable of participating fully in a
classroom of Arabic speakers. Their training in peroration in the formal Arabic of declamation not-
withstanding, they lack the discourse skills necessary to the cut-and-thrust of conversation, even in
the highly formalized atmosphere of the classroom, in which the teaching is conducted in a combi-
nation of high formal and conversational Arabic, with the instructors tending toward the former and
the students interrogating them in the latter.
A generation after Allen wrote about the state of affairs, the difficulty has not been resolved by the
recent implementation of the integrated approach to Arabic teaching, which attempts to introduce a
spoken vernacular of Arabic and the language of reading and writing simultaneously in a single class-
room. Indeed, the adoption of that approach has if anything complicated the Arabic study-abroad
curriculum, becoming once again a matter of practical concern in programs, including that at AUB.

The Integrated Approach at AUB

In point of fact, the integrated approach is nothing new at AUB; teaching the local spoken variety
of Arabic has been integrated into AFL at AUB since its inception in the early 20th century (Kozah,

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2016, p. 284), and certainly since its revival in the early 21st. This is a sensible position, reflecting the
reality of the study-abroad experience: Students must get by in the local vernacular while living in
their host countries. Nor was it adopted after much soul searching. By the time the AFL program
at AUB had revived, the value of teaching Arabic dialects was at least acknowledged in the field if
often honoured only in the breach. Maintaining two tracks, one for the formal Arabic of modern
writing and another for the spoken Arabic of Beirut, however, was dictated by the curriculum itself.
Being housed at an American institution, meaning that it is a study-abroad destination for American
students, the program adopted the MSA textbook that was most commonly in use in the United
States: the Georgetown series Al-Kitaab fī Taʾallum al-ʾArabiyya—A Textbook for Teaching Arabic. First
introduced in 1995, the series had adopted a modest integrated approach from its very beginning,
with the preliminary text of the series Alif Baaʾ introducing the alphabet and concentrating upon the
spoken Arabic of Cairo. The series of the second edition began to appear in the middle of the fol-
lowing decade. Its colloquial segments appended to the final pages of each lesson, these were easy to
ignore, and in any case, it served no purpose to introduce students in Beirut to the vernacular Arabic
of Cairo. For that reason, CAMES was obliged to produce its own materials for students wishing to
learn the local dialect, and there was no impetus for attempting to integrate those materials into the
lessons of Al-Kitaab.
This changed in 2011 with the introduction of the third edition of al-Kitaab, which integrated the
Cairene and Damascene varieties of spoken Arabic into the body of the lessons, reducing the MSA
content of the chapters in order to accommodate the dialect material, in the process arranging the
presentation of MSA grammar in the third edition in a sequence different from that presented in the
second. Now included in the lessons were some well-conceived listening materials in the dialect of
Damascus, featuring established actors and rising stars of Syrian television dramas and films perform-
ing the roles of the Syrian counterparts to the principals of the original Egyptian narrative along
with some engaging side stories.6 Incorporating the two dialects into the lessons gave programs some
flexibility in choosing which dialect to present to students, but there was no longer any ignoring
the dialect component of those lessons. For the program at AUB, the choice was clear: with Cairene
Arabic never an option, the dialect of Damascus was the less than ideal default. It remains less than
ideal because requiring native speakers of the Arabic of Lebanon to teach Syrian Arabic is rather
like requiring the British to teach American English in their overseas schools. It can work, but it
somehow seems to miss the point. Just as students at a British school may justifiably expect to receive
their instruction in British English, so may students of Arabic at the American University of Beirut
justifiably expect to receive instruction in Lebanese Arabic.7
Regardless, AUB teachers took the new curricular orientation with some good humour and a
measure of goodwill. The larger problems that emerged with it lay elsewhere. The first of these to
appear with a vengeance was that the 13 lessons of the third edition of Book I no longer articulated
well with the remaining seven of the 20 lessons of its second-edition predecessor, lessons that stu-
dents and their teachers, lacking any other alternative, were in the event obliged to follow. The result
was that students were leaving the beginning levels of MSA to enter the intermediate less prepared
than they heretofore had been.The second was subtler but equally devastating in its potential to pre-
cipitate curricular collapse: The dialect materials in the third edition did not constitute a fully devel-
oped course in the study of a local vernacular but were instead meant to shadow the MSA lessons, for
example, providing students with the by now infamous Lesson 1 vocabulary item “United Nations”
rendered into the Damascene colloquial il-umǝm il-mutah· ǝdi but never the Arabic word for the pil-
low that the Egyptian Maha character’s Damascene double Nesreen is cradling or the couch upon
which she is sitting when they first hear it, neither those nor any of a myriad everyday words and
constructions that students need for navigating life in Beirut’s homes, streets, shops, and nightspots.
For example, because the story line dictates the use of the verb ‘to want’ (“I entered business school,
as my father wanted”), its Arabic equivalent is provided, in MSA, Egyptian, and Levantine Arabics. But

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the Arabic for the verb ‘to give’ is not, presumably because the basic MSA stories never encounter the
need for it. If the MSA curriculum may be justified in postponing until later stages the introduction
of the defective IVth measure verb aʿṭā ‘to give’, a well-constructed course in any spoken vernacular
of Arabic is entirely remiss if it does not present it early. Nor could it neglect requesting and giving
pronominal objects, syntactic constructions that students are likely to encounter daily and, it is to be
hoped, begin to use: badd-i yyā-h;8 aʿṭī-ni yyā-h ‘I want it; give me it.’9
The long-awaited 2013 release of the third edition of Book II resolved the first difficulty, but
the integrated approach it adopts can never address the second. With that realization, the Arabic
teaching staff at AUB decided to return to the second edition of al-Kitaab for its concentration on
MSA and to leave the teaching of the local vernacular to sections of its own, furnished with a more
richly populated lexicon in a purpose-built curriculum, but incorporating as much of the listening-
comprehension dialect material of the new al-Kitaab editions as possible.10
This does not constitute a failure of the integrated approach. Instead, it highlights the stark
differences in learning tasks facing students in their home institutions contrasted with those that
they face in study abroad. With the integrated approach implemented in the introductory and
intermediate classes in many stateside and some European universities, they now benefit from an
overview of both Arabic systems. In study abroad, however, whether they are beginners or advanced,
they need to delve deeper into each, and if a choice must be made, the default should be toward
the local vernacular. They can study MSA to its lofty literary heights anywhere, but their presence
in country affords them a golden opportunity to engage the richness of the Arabic being spoken
within earshot.
Younes (2015, p. 23), in his defense of the integrated approach, comes close to identifying two
glaring contradictions based in several unsupported assumptions, nay naked biases, in the justifica-
tions put forward by one of that approach’s staunchest of advocates for the single-minded emphasis
on the Arabic of writing through which the earlier generation of AFL students suffered:

Students taking Arabic . . . are roughly of two types.The first consists mainly of graduate students
who have made some commitment to some field of Middle Eastern Studies. This often is the
only thing they have in common, and here they part ways. Some want only enough control of
a spoken variety of Arabic to enable them to do field work in anthropology or the like; others
need only a reading knowledge of MSA so as to have access to the newspapers, government
documents, financial reports, etc.; still others are only interested in working with medieval
materials and manuscripts, and have no use for the oral part of the language. The second group
are mainly undergraduates, many of whom have no definite commitment to the field but take
Arabic to fulfill foreign language requirements.
(Abboud, 1971, pp. 2–3)

These assertions are contestable on many counts. For one, there are not two but five distinct groups
of students here, and it is not clear which represents the “average student” for whom the solution to
such diversity is that, “MSA is more useful for the average student” (Abboud, 1971, p. 4), itself a con-
tested point. Beyond that, the writer dismisses both the utility of advanced proficiency in an Arabic
vernacular and at the same time an entire profession, as if anthropologists need but a smattering of
local lingos in order to discern complex cultural phenomena sufficiently to enable them to construct
subtle analyses and thick descriptions of Arabophone societies. For that matter, even at the time of
these assertions, the notion was indefensible that a reader of “newspapers, government documents,
financial reports, etc.” and “medieval materials and manuscripts” alike may never need actually to
speak in Arabic with the producers of the former or local scholars of the latter, and therefore, “have
no use for the oral part of the language” (Abboud, 1971, p. 4).

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Be that as it may, if we assume along with Younes that what is meant is that average students are
actually “mainly undergraduates, many of whom have no definite commitment to the field but take
Arabic to fulfill foreign language requirements” (Abboud, 1971, p. 4), then plying them with nothing
but MSA, which, by the admission of this stout advocate of the fu·s·hā-only method (Abboud, 1971,
pp. 4–5), takes at least three years of college-level instruction before average students even approach
“gaining sufficient competence in it” to “remain culturally informed” (Abboud, 1971, p. 4), is hardly
useful at all.11 Therein, lies the contradiction. The irony is that the writer also acknowledges the
utility of the “alternate solution to the problem of which form of Arabic to teach”: “the colloquial
and MSA are integrated into one course. This has been tried, with success at the Defense Language
Institute” (Abboud, 1971, p. 4)—tried with success, that is, before 1971.Thirty-three years later, it has
finally been fully implemented and tried again.
A further irony is that in study abroad, it does not work. After an unsatisfactory experi-
ence with the integrated approach adopted briefly with the introduction of the third edition
al-Kitaab, both AUB programs—that of the academic year and the intensive summer program
alike—returned to the second edition with its emphasis on the formal Arabic of reading and writ-
ing, leaving Lebanese-spoken Arabic in dedicated classes or class periods of its own. The CAMES
summer program abandoned the approach after but one unsatisfactory trial in the summer of
2013. For its part, the academic year program attempted to implement the new curriculum for a
full four semesters, that is, for two full years, before eventually abandoning it.
The integrated approach is perhaps the best solution to the vexed question as to which variety of
Arabic to teach in the academy; but it complicates the study abroad curriculum. Henceforth, students
are not going to articulate seamlessly between the curricula of their home institutions and those of
their study abroad destinations, because the learning tasks in one place and the other are divergent.
Nevertheless, the integrated approach will prepare students for the language realities that they will
encounter in study abroad far better than the fush·ā-only approach ever did. Indeed, that approach was
˙
doomed to fail, and it has failed an entire generation.12

Beirut as a Study Abroad Destination

Curricular matters notwithstanding, Beirut is in many ways the ideal Arabic study-abroad loca-
tion, especially for students engaging in their first Arabic study-abroad experience. Against the odds,
remaining “an island of stability” in the region, Lebanon is an outward-looking, tolerant, multilingual
society in which novice students can get along using Arabic, English, or French.This is especially true
in the Ras Beirut (Beirut Promontory) neighbourhood of the American University of Beirut, with
its theatres, art galleries, restaurants, nightspots, and two American universities, sometimes called “the
Republic of Ras Beirut” for the easy-going, nonsectarian, westernized outlook on life of its denizens.
Although the opportunity to get by in a language other than the target language may seem to
mount a hindrance to second-language acquisition, recent thinking about the study-abroad experi-
ence suggests the opposite:

Authenticity for nativeness today must take into account the reality of bilingual, multilingual,
and intercultural speakers . . . as intercultural mentors who mediate communication, these flu-
ent . . . speakers might provide more scaffolding for learners than typical, monolingual native
speakers.
(Magnan and Black, 2007, p. 55)

Experience with AFL students at AUB who integrate themselves to some degree into the social fab-
ric of Beirut corroborates this, some of them making noticeable gains in proficiency as much from

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their involvement in the many opportunities for social engagement in and around Beirut as from
their classroom practice. It is semester and year abroad students who manage this kind of integration
more easily than do summer students, there being little time for such integration during the intensive
summer program and fewer student activities on the AUB campus during the summer term.To offset
that somewhat, the CAMES summer program itself organizes outings and social-service activities
for students who wish to engage in them with some of the many civil-society service organizations
operating in the country.

Conclusion
The multiculturalism of the AUB environs offers a welcoming blend of Western and Eastern life-
ways, thoroughly conducive to furnishing novice learners an easy entrée into to the study of Arabic
abroad. One notable benefit among many—especially advantageous to women students—is that the
sexual harassment for which Cairo is infamous is almost completely absent from the streets of Beirut.
This is of no small consequence. A consistent theme of research into the study-abroad experience
is that male students make greater proficiency gains than do their female colleagues when pursuing
language study abroad in societies exhibiting marked distinctions in gender roles and expectations
(Brecht et al., 1995, pp. 55–58; Polanyi, 1995, pp. 280–284) or those that Western women perceive
as being sexist (Kinginger, 2011, pp. 65–66). Significantly, Davidson (2010, pp. 20 and 25, n. 3) has
remarked that societal changes toward more equitable gender attitudes can alleviate such disparities
in the learning outcomes of study-abroad students. Such changes came long ago to Beirut culture.
It has not yet become a paradise of gender equality—no place has—but its advancement toward
that goal is analogous to that of Western societies. Thus, with virtually no sexual harassment on the
streets, a vibrant art scene and nightlife,13 myriad opportunities for engagement with civil society,
and its blend of Western and Eastern outlooks, Beirut is almost an ideal environment for an Arabic
study-abroad experience.

Notes
1 In 1947, the Arabist Charles Ferguson established in Beirut an 18-month training program for two Ameri-
can foreign-service officers. He returned in 1953 to set up a center for the Foreign Service Institute of the
United States government (McCarus, 1992, p. 209). In fact, many Foreign Service Institute Arabic trainees
studied at the MECAS school in Shemlan (Craig, 1998, pp. 70–71). The Beirut center closed in 1975 and
moved to Tunis, which center itself closed in 2012.
2 After closing its center in Damascus in 2011, the CASA program has since opened an alternate Levantine
location at the privately owned Qasid Institute of Amman, Jordan.
3 The war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 depressed enrolments in the following year, but numbers had
recovered by 2008, with the summer program witnessing a high point of some 95 students, despite the brief
street clashes between rival political factions in early May of 2008, about six weeks before the summer pro-
gram was to begin.
4 By contrast, the teaching at MECAS aimed initially to “impart a full reading knowledge of newspaper and
radio Arabic . . . with little systematic attempt to teach colloquial” (Craig, 1998, p. 22). It was to remain such
for more than a decade until 1956 when MECAS eventually produced and began to use a grammar of con-
versational Lebanese Arabic; but it was not until 1966 that “colloquial Arabic began to be taught seriously”
(Craig, 1998, pp. 60–61). Regardless, Ryding (personal communication) observes that in the mid-sixties, her
teachers at AUB used MECAS materials in the teaching of spoken Lebanese Arabic.
5 If “Arabic as used by educated Egyptians in conversation” seems to indicate the spoken vernacular of Cairo,
it happens that in that era, the Arabic teaching profession appeared to be placing its hopes in an elusive entity
called “Educated Spoken Arabic” among other names, which was apparently imagined to be some sort of
fush·ā light, preserving the basic structures of MSA while allowing an occasional colloquialism in a vernacu-
lar˙ pseudo verb, negator, or interrogative to slip into the flow of speech now and then. A textbook even
attempted to routinize for students this type of intermingling of the two forms of the language (Ryding,

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1990). See Ryding’s (2013, pp. 178–180) practical considerations for implementing such a curriculum in the
classroom.
6 The production values of the earlier Syrian materials are considerably inferior to those of later ones, the
sound quality in the early lessons being such that some of the dialogue is almost imperceptible, especially in
an open classroom.
7 The matter has been ameliorated somewhat with the 2015 release of an optional set of materials featuring
Beirutis Yara and Jamil as counterparts to the Cairenes Maha and Khaled and the Damascenes Nesreen and
Tareq. More useful, still, are the side-story materials recounting the potential rivalry between a Lebanese
young man and a Lebanese-American study-abroad student for the affections of their colleague at university.
8 With the Beiruti realization of the pseudo-verb badd- rather than the Damascene bidd-.
9 This sort of functionality transcends the dichotomy of “primary” and “secondary” discourses to which
Ryding (2006, pp. 15–16; 2013, p. 178) refers, the former constituting “the most basic everyday discourse”
supposedly being conducted amongst family and friends and the latter in public venues, vernacular Arabic
being appropriate in both contexts.
10 Students at the beginning levels, for whom the Maha and Khaled story is intended as means of introducing
the basic structures of Arabic, find the speech in the Yara and Jamil Lebanese materials to be impossibly rapid.
11 The assertion can also be contested as impressionistic (with the origin of the impression being by no means
clear), whereas actual data collected 15 years later (Belnap, 1987) present an entirely different picture of the
average student of Arabic, findings corroborated early in the new millennium (Belnap, 2006).
12 For a good illustration of the awkward moments engendered when a student arrives in an Arabophone
environment after several semesters of the reigning fu·s·hā-only approach of the 1970s, see Campbell (1986),
and the subsequent critique of that technique, much of that critique still relevant today.
13 Because of which, in 2009, the New York Times named Beirut as the first of 44 travel destinations for the year,
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/11/travel/20090111_DESTINATIONS.html.

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