The Arabic department recently increased the number of credits, course time and faculty for its courses, according to Ana Serra, the chair of the Language and Foreign Studies Department.
The move was designed to better compete with other university Arabic programs and better prepare students to speak fluently both in and out of the classroom.
“The number of enrollments in Arabic has been growing exponentially in the past few years,” Serra said.
Elementary and intermediate language courses are currently worth four credits and advanced courses worth three. Wednesday class sessions currently run for 50 minutes.
This fall, the elementary and intermediate levels will be five credits with 100-minute Wednesday sessions or 250 minutes per week. The advanced level will be four credits with 50-minute Wednesday sessions.
These changes are a direct result of student feedback. Many have returned from study abroad programs in Arabic-speaking countries and said they were not prepared to speak there, according to Serra.
“I put myself in my students’ shoes, and I understand that it’s sort of inconvenient for you to have to devote so much time and devote so many of your credits ... but it’s like, ‘OK, do you want to learn Arabic?’” Serra said.
This summer the Arabic department will begin intensive courses during which classes will meet four days a week. The elementary and intermediate levels will gain eight credits by meeting for three hours per day over nine weeks. The advanced topics level will meet for three hours and 15 minutes over six weeks to earn six credits.
“It’s a lot of credits, but you knock out two semesters,” Serra said. “Language in general is best when it’s learned with a lot of intensity, with a lot of exposure — Arabic in particular. So the summer is a good time [for students] to do it, not when [they are] doing a zillion other things and taking a zillion other courses.”
Georgetown University offers a competitive Arabic program where students take classes four times a week for six credits, Serra said.
“In order to catch up with other universities that have a level of intensity in Arabic to be able to bring their students to a level of proficiency, we’ve had to raise that number of credits and contact hours,” she said.
Erez Naaman, a Harvard University graduate, will join the faculty in the fall as the language’s first tenure-track professor. Naaman will teach an Arab and Islamic course as well as an advanced Arabic course and topics courses as an assistant professor.
Ideally, the same changes will happen in the Chinese, Japanese and Russian language departments, Serra said.
“At this point, we don’t have the necessary faculty support to do that,” she said. “We want to offer our students classes that are taught by qualified professors, and we don’t yet have enough of those professors to provide that many contact hours, those many classes.”
Chinese, Japanese and Russian are currently five credits at the elementary and intermediate levels. Elementary Korean also has five credits. However, Russian, Japanese and Chinese are only three credits at the advanced level.
You can reach this staff writer at sdazio@theeagleonline.com.
