Arabic Language Study

With the generous Abbasi Grant, I attended the Middlebury Summer Intensive Language Program in Arabic. The program was an eight-week long immersive program that featured around six hours of language learning four days a week and with a half day of language learning on Wednesday. There were additional cultural aspects to the program, such as lectures in Arabic about themes such as marriage traditions and politics, Friday night film showings, Arab food tastings, and cultural classes in music, dance, the Koran, the Bible, current events, etc. As an upper level language student, I also attended dialect class once a week. The experience itself was very intense – not only is the environment fully in Arabic, the coursework provides a unique and rigorous approach to language learning. Our nightly homework consisted of reading articles, answering comprehension questions, and grammar. Additionally, we were tested weekly on our materials, performed two oral presentations, had a mid-term and a final, and wrote a final 2,500-word essay in Arabic, and were required to perform in a seven-minute long talent show.

The themes discussed in class, lectures, and films were very pertinent to the modern world. We touched on subjects such as marriage and religion, education, gender, and politics. A text my class used was Media Arabic, which allowed us to explore words and phrases that are less common in traditional Arabic textbooks used in universities. In class, we would engage in debates, all in Arabic, about films we watched or questions we had, which provided a unique experience in using the language. The constant immersion in Arabic created an environment in which language learning not only existed with our teachers, but with other students as well. At meal times, there was constant teaching and correcting from student to student, creating a friendly atmosphere to learn in.

I have already seen the benefits of my time from Middlebury in my current studies at Oxford. My tutorial has been in Politics in the Middle East and I have drawn from discussions we had in class for my papers; books that I have read also use Arabic phrases to describe certain religious and political terms, which we had discussed at Middlebury. With concentrating in the Middle East and Central Asia as part of my International Relations major, a summer intensely studying Arabic and Arab culture and how the Muslim identity ties into these themes has truly been helpful to intimately understanding the region.