Popularity of Arabic on rise in U.S.A.

[Al-khiyal]

SALEM, January 2, 2008 -- As a little girl, Suja Hamida fled with her family from Somalia after civil war broke out in the African nation.

She traveled through Ethiopia before settling in Saudi Arabia, where she lived for several years. Hamida went to school in Saudi Arabia and even learned to speak and write Arabic, the native language. It turns out the little girl from Somalia had a facility for languages.

"I love languages," said Hamida, now a Salem State College junior. "Languages just come easy for me."

But after moving to the United States about a decade ago, she forgot a lot of things - including some of her Arabic. That explains her excitement when Salem State began offering classes in Arabic last year and, in part, why she transferred here from another college.

"That's why I came," she said.

Hamida, a biology major, is one of several dozen students who have signed up for Arabic at Salem State over the past two years. The courses were first offered as independent studies by Michael Weber of the history department and have grown into a full-fledged language program.

This fall, a total of 20 students, the maximum allowed in a language course, signed up for Arabic 101. They came for a variety of reasons.

There are some Muslim students who wanted to read the Quran, an official said, but that's not the only reason for the interest.

Rachel Emelock, a junior, plans to go to graduate school to study history and sees Arabic as a key to learning about an important region of the world. She also likes the challenge.

"I'm taking Arabic because it's different and it's fun," she said.

Sophomore Christine O'Connell is considering a career as a diplomat.

"I have this kind of lofty ambition," she said. "I want to work at an embassy. It would be really cool if I worked at an embassy where I could speak the language and interact with the people."

The emergence of Arabic at Salem State mirrors a national trend. Enrollments have more than doubled on college campuses over the past five years, and Arabic recently made the top 10 list of most-studied languages at American colleges and universities, according to a November survey by the Modern Language Association.

It is no coincidence that the growing interest in Arabic, Islam and Middle Eastern studies followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officials say. Many college students, and Americans in general, want to know more about that part of the world.

"After 9/11, you could see the demand to learn the Arabic language and to learn about Islam rise up," said Abdelkader Berrahmoun, a native of Algeria and the Arabic instructor at Salem State.

"After 9/11, they wanted to learn more about the religion and this part of the world they didn't know about. It was also an opportunity for students to learn about people from the Middle East. It's good because it opens up the minds of (students) on the language and the culture."

Although a lot of students have signed up for Arabic at Salem State, a lot also have dropped the course. Arabic 101, which started with 20 students, was down to 14 by the end of the semester.

"I think the main dropout is after elementary (Arabic 101 and 102)," Jon Aske, chairman of the foreign language department, wrote in e-mail. "Learning a language is very time-consuming, and learning Arabic very much so."

For most students, Arabic really is a foreign language. The 29 letters and several symbols aren't like anything they have encountered in French, Spanish or German classes.

"It's a difficult language to start with," Berrahmoun said. "Everything is different. ... It's difficult, but it's beautiful at the same time."

There is another reason, though, for the relatively high dropout rate at Salem State. Arabic classes are taught at the South Campus, which is off Loring Avenue and some distance from the main campus. For students without a car, it's a long walk on a cold winter day.

"That won't happen again," Aske said of the remote location.

Popularity of Arabic on rise at Salem State

[Al-khiyal]

Zahra al-Attar using flash cards to teach Arabic to fourth-graders in Kalona, Iowa

KALONA, Iowa, January 2, 2008: Zahra al-Attar drove down the two-lane highway from Iowa City to her morning classes here. As she entered Kalona (population 2,200), and change, she rolled past the harness shop and the veterinary clinic, those reminders of her dislocation. She noticed, too, a horse-drawn buggy on the shoulder, an unexpected cue for memory.

When she was growing up in Baghdad nearly 40 years ago, she rode a similar cart to school. On occasion, the driver would let her hold the reins. Here and now, the buggies belong to the Amish. And into their part of Iowa, she had come to teach Arabic.

While the Amish do not send their children to public schools, considering them too worldly, Attar's students at Kalona Elementary are the sons and daughters of Mennonite families who have been here for generations or of Germans and Czechs who arrived in Iowa a century before the new teacher.

Yet when Attar bounded into a kindergarten early last month, one Muslim in a roomful of Caitlins and Haileys, the walls decorated with paper candy canes for Christmas, she was greeted with the chirping chorus of an Arabic song.

Over the next 30 minutes, until the first period ended, Attar led the class through the Arabic numbers 13 through 19 and the Arabic words for "hand" and "pencil." Together, they sang an alphabet song, with the letters pegged to familiar objects like a duck, a lemon, the sun.

Two hours later, when Attar took her first break, she said with a touch of rapture, "Every day, I'm like, whoa, how did this happen?"

This happened because in the early 1980s, a young woman named Susan Swartzendruber moved from the Kalona area to an Egyptian village to teach English as part of a Mennonite social service program. During three years in the Nile Delta, Swartzendruber learned a passable version of Arabic and acquired the habit of defying global divides.

Two years ago, while teaching in Kalona and studying at a local college for her certification to teach English as a second language, Swartzendruber heard from her professor about a new federal grant - the Foreign Language Acquisition Program - that would provide money for schools to teach languages of strategic importance.

Swartzendruber persuaded her superiors in the Mid-Prairie School District here to apply, and in the summer of 2006, it received a $200,000 grant that covers three years of classes.

About the same time, a member of mosque that Attar attends in Iowa City, about 15 miles, or 25 kilometers, north of Kalona, called her attention to a flier on the bulletin board that was advertising for a native Arabic speaker to teach in a nearby town.

Attar's academic and professional background had mostly been in business, including several years as a personal banker in Atlanta. But having followed her husband, a professor of medicine, to the University of Iowa, and with two toddlers, she had worked most recently in an after-school activity program.

Her life had known stranger twists, some of them life-threatening.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein expelled her family because of its strain of Persian ancestry. When President Bill Clinton ordered cruise missiles to be fired into Baghdad in 1998 to force Saddam to cooperate with arms inspectors, Attar said, one intended for an intelligence services building killed a friend's parents in their home.

So last autumn, in the second year of the federal grant, Attar's peripatetic path delivered her to Kalona Elementary School.

Each week, all 230 pupils from kindergarten through fifth grade receive two 30-minute lessons from her. The children use, and will keep, three Arabic textbooks apiece, ordered from Jordan.

The books can barely compete with Attar's energy and invention.

She has taught Arabic through maps, glossaries, bingo games and pictures of imaginary islands. One of her favorite props is a small rubber model of a brain. She has made sure to introduce words with immediate resonance, like "thura" for "corn" and "baqara" for "cow," even if the students' favorite seems to be "hammam" for "bathroom."

But in a static, homogenous place, even such innocuous lessons carry risk. Some early foes of the Arabic program asked why Iowa children should be learning "the language of the enemy." Jim Cayton, the principal, heard complaints that Christians were being taught to be Muslims.

"Of course I was worried," Swartzendruber said. "There's almost no diversity here, and most people have been here forever. But I thought, all the more reason to do it here. What better way to break down the stereotype than to see the person, know the person?"

In addressing local fears, it helped that school officials could say that the grant had been created by the Bush administration. It helped that the program avoids religion entirely.

It helped, too, that Attar does not wear the traditional hijab, or head scarf, and that she speaks fluent English, albeit with an Iraqi accent.

Besides teaching her classes, she has established an Arabic culture club, which draws about 35 students, parents and staff members to meetings once a month. She has brought her family to Kalona for ice cream socials and bike-safety rallies. "When I first started, I thought, 'Wow, Arabic in Kalona? What's this going to be like?' " Attar said. "But everyone has been so welcoming."

One recent Tuesday, she was guest speaker at the Kalona Rotary Club luncheon, tucking into the Swiss steak before speaking about her curriculum and her family's life under Saddam.

One man asked her to translate aloud part of the Rotary newsletter, The Kalonian, into Arabic. When Attar finished, the audience applauded.

Bridging a culture gap, teaching Arabic in Iowa

[Bent_Bladi]

wow... mashaAllah that's awesome (i just hope it's not for other reasons...)

when i was in fourth grade, our english class read a book that took place in morocco (i completely forgot what it was called). so after we finished it, my dad came to the class and taught each of my classmates some basic words in arabic and how to right their names in it. haha for the rest of the year, the kids would write their names in english then in arabic on any assignment/test/project they would do.... hahahaha the other teachers were SOOOOOOOO confused

[amalgamate]

Arabic is taught as a second language in the school i'm currently teaching in.

it's different and amazing when you see american's work on their arabic homework and realize they could sing a classical old arabic song.