Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies

Please join us for an exciting semester of Arabic Lectures! Information will be updated as we approach the event dates.

22 March, 4:00pm, ICC 462: Claire Kramsch (University of California, Berkeley), New Perspectives on Culture in Foreign Language Study

Globalization and the spread of multilingualism around the world have put into question the equation one national language = one national culture on which much of foreign language teaching is traditionally based. Culture today is no longer just a way of life or a pragmatic etiquette but portable historicities and embodied subjectivities expressed through symbolic systems like language. This talk attempts to recapture culture as the semiotic and symbolic dimension of language learning and its links to history an memory.

24 March, 4:00pm, ICC 462: Richard Schmidt (University of Hawai'i), Attention, Noticing and Foreign Language Teaching: Issues and Implications

The Noticing Hypothesis –an hypothesis that input does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered (Schmidt, 1990, 2001)—has been around now for about two decades and continues to generate experimental studies, suggestions for L2 pedagogy, and controversy. To many people, the idea that SLA is largely driven by what learners pay attention to and become aware of in target language input seems the essence of common sense. Others consider the hypothesis to be undesirably vague, lacking in empirical support, or incompatible with well-grounded theories. In this paper I will review some of the evidence for the hypothesis, as well the major objections that have been raised against it from a variety of perspectives. I will conclude by discussing the degree to which the Noticing Hypothesis is compatible (or not) with a wide range of pedagogical approaches, including metalinguistic explanation, structural drill, extensive reading programs, repeated reading and repeated listening, communicative tasks that emphasize using the language rather than on explicitly practicing language forms, visual enhancement and other attention-focusing techniques, VanPatten’s proposals for processing instruction, focus on form (FonF), recasts, reformulation and reconstruction, and pushed output.

1 April, 3:00pm, ICC 270: Dilworth Parkinson (Brigham Young University), Using arabiCorpus: Adventures in Arabic Lexis

This presentation will demonstrate the need for Arabic corpus tools, present the features of arabiCorpus.byu.edu, and demonstrate the variety of ways it can be used. This is a tool that can be extremely helpful for both researchers and (advanced) students of Arabic who are interested in Arabic words and how they are used.