Five Colleges, Incorporated: Media Arabic Grant

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New Grant Supports Course in Media Arabic

(from the Fall 2006 issue of Ink Newsbreaks)

Five Colleges, Incorporated has received a grant of $600,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a new language learning project to be undertaken by the Center for the Study of World Languages. The grant will be used by the center over the next four years to design upper-level offerings in Hindi, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the Arabic dialects for independent learners at the Five Colleges and beyond. It will also support the development of a course in media Arabic as well as online pedagogical resources to help native speakers who will be working with those learning one or more of those languages.

Commenting on the award, Lorna M. Peterson, executive director of Five Colleges, Incorporated, said: “The Center for the Study of World Languages, under the direction of Elizabeth Mazzocco, professor of Italian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has established itself as a vital curricular resource for the learning of languages that are not normally offered at the undergraduate level. The center’s work has enabled our schools to respond to student interest in these languages in a manner that is both pedagogically sound and cost-effective. It also serves to accommodate students who need the flexibility that this form of instruction offers. We are grateful once again to The Mellon Foundation for its continuing support of the center’s work.”

The center’s latest project, she noted, builds on the success of its Supervised Independent Language Program (SILP) and its mentored language model. During the past three years, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CSWL has created and launched

a series of multimedia, Internet-delivered curricular guides for the study of elementary and intermediate levels of Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Turkish, and Turkmen; developed a written component for less commonly taught languages through the introduction of a mentored language program for Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili; and introduced the use of Fulbright scholars to serve as native language mentors and instructors.

Originally, the center had envisioned the mentored language course sequence just for elementary and intermediate levels of Arabic and elementary Hindi. Last year, however, 42 students were enrolled in Arabic with the center, 18 of whom were working above intermediate level. Of 20 enrollments in Hindi, five were at intermediate level. “These numbers argued strongly for new resources for the advanced independent learner,” said Elizabeth Mazzocco. “Equally evident,” she added, “was the need to understand the differences between Modern Standard Arabic and the Arabic dialects: Levantine, Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi, Gulf, and Tunisian.”

One of the first things Mazzocco says she and the center’s associate director, Amy Wordelman, learned in studying Arabic pedagogy was that “students learn to read and write Modern Standard Arabic and are asked to speak it too, but are rarely given audio examples of the speech.” To fill this gap, the center staff created the MSA dialogues, which Mazzocco believes are unique in the field of MSA.

Building on what has been accomplished to date, the new grant from Mellon, says Mazzocco, will support the development of much-needed courses and multimedia materials that focus on the Arabic dialects. The course in media Arabic, for example, which is already in the first stage of development, Mazzocco credits to a student’s senior project. “Last November,” she says, “a Mount Holyoke student majoring in international relations wanted to analyze Egyptian editorials about America. So working with an Egyptian mentor, we designed a unit for her.” Out of that experience, says Mazzocco, came the realization that a course on media Arabic would be of great value to other students interested in print matter, Web site, and broadcast news such as Al-Jazeera. And the center plans to continue to develop special units of language study that, like the Egyptian editorial example, can be incorporated into interdisciplinary studies. Because the expansion of curriculum will require continued and expanded use of Fulbright scholars, grant funds will be used to fund new online teaching resources for the Fulbrights to use in their work with students as mentors, conversation partners, or program directors.

Posted 10/2/06

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