As part of the LHEBC cluster, a research team at Syracuse University, USA (pictured L-R: Amanda Brown, Associate Professor of Linguistics; Emily Grenz, MA student in Linguistics; Sabrina Rambaran, BA student in linguistics and psychology; and Mohammed El Hamzaoui, Arabic language instructor) recently concluded a 10-week, longitudinal study on effective ways to teach Arabic as a foreign language to English-speaking beginners in a community-based setting in the USA. The study targeted Modern Standard Arabic with a major focus on oral-aural skills, vocabulary, and some basic grammar. Writing activities employed transliteration using the Roman alphabet. Two courses, each with 20 students, were taught using respectively a monolingual immersive pedagogy (as close to exclusive use of Arabic as possible) and a translanguaging pedagogy, in which the use of Arabic was complemented by a use of English at the instructor’s discretion for classroom functions such as activity instructions, grammar and vocabulary explanations, and cultural notes. Each group was observed, with the ratio of languages used estimated for each lesson segment; learners completed weekly quizzes with activities that focused on oral and written comprehension and production of target vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

The class observation data showed close to 100% use of Arabic in the immersive environment, and a wide range of English language use (between 5% and 95% in each lesson segment) in the translanguaging environment. Analysis of learning outcomes is ongoing, but preliminary examination indicates higher scores from the translanguaging group on weekly quizzes. If these results are indeed robust, this suggests that multilingual pedagogies, such as ‘translanguaging’ (Garcia & Wei, 2014), which recruit a learner’s full linguistic repertoire, may facilitate second language acquisition at beginning levels of proficiency, particularly in the context of a less commonly taught language in the USA. A rather unexpected development was that more than 160 adults applied to join the study, which could unfortunately only accommodate 40. We are additionally looking into the motivations of the learners who joined, and we hope to offer more community-based Arabic classes in the future.