Are those equal,those who know and those who do not know?

go back to the main page

Arabic in the USA

Issues in the field of language learning and teaching have changed tremendously since Arabic was introduced in this country almost fifty years ago. Recent years have witnessed a movement for change spearheaded by university students, their instructors, and decision-makers. A new generation of professors, who are professionally trained in linguistics and language acquisition and pedagogy, have been arguing openly for supplementing, if not replacing, the traditional philological programs where Arabic is taught either as a means for reading text or as a linguistic system per se. They believe that not only does this approach prevent students from realizing their full potentials in achieving communicative skills, it also goes against the results of the substantial amount of research in foreign language acquisition that has been conducted since the seventies. The demand is for more communicative programs where focus is not on reading but also on the rest of the four skills plus culture.

Furthermore, these professors seem to maintain Chomsky's theory and distinction between competence and performance. Competence, according to Chomsky, refers to the individual's knowledge of grammar and other aspects of language, while performance refers to actual use, i.e., realization of this knowledge. In his view, a theory of competence is equivalent to a theory of grammar and is concerned with linguistic rules that can generate and describe the grammatical sentences of a language. A theory of performance, on the other hand, focuses on the acceptability of sentences in speech production and is a theory of interaction between the theory of grammar and non-grammatical psychological factors that influence the individual language user.

The following is a list of the Arabic programs at various colleges and universities in the USA. We have limited the list only to those which have websites.
 Abilene Christian University  Emory University
 American University  Florida International University
 Arizona State University  Florida State University
 Barnard College  George Washington University
 Baylor University  Georgetown University
 Boston College  Hamilton College
 Boston University  Hartford Seminary
 Brigham Young University  Hobart & William Smith College
 Brown University  Hofstra University
 College of Charleston  Howard University
 College of William & Mary  Indiana University of Pennsylvania
 Carleton University  Johns Hopkins University
 Catholic University  Kent State University
 Colorado State University  Louisiana State University
 Columbia University  Loyola University, Chicago
 Concordia University  Mesa Community College
 Cornell University  Middlebury College
 CUNY, Brooklyn  Morgan State University
 CUNY, Queens  Mount Holyoke College
   NYSU, Binghamton
 Davidson College  NYSU, Buffalo
 DePaul University  Northwestern University
 Duke University  New York University
 Duquesne University  Penn State University

Go back to the top


 Portland State University  University of Minnesota Twin Cities
 Princeton University  University of Minnesota, Kansas City
 Purdue University  University of North Carolina
 Rice University  University of New Orleans
 Rutgers University  University of Notre Dame
 Samford University University of Pennsylvania
 Stanford University  University of Rochester
 Temple University  University of South Carolina
 Tufts University  University of South Florida
 University of California, Berkeley  University of Southern California
 UC, Los Angeles  University of Texas. Austin
 UC, Santa Barbara  University of Utah
 University of Chicago  University of Virginia
 University of Cincinnati  University of Washington
 University of Denver  University of Wisconsin, Madison
 University of Florida  University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
 University of Georgia, Athens  Utah State University
 University of Illinois, Chicago  Vanderbilt University
 University of Illinois, Urbana  Vassar College
 University of Kansas  Villanova University
 University of Maryland  Washington University, St Louis
 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor  Wayne State University
 University of Miami  Weber University


Go back to the main page

Go back to the top