ERIC Number: EJ1421179
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Apr
Pages: 34
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1085-4568
EISSN: EISSN-2380-8144
Promoting Arabic as a Foreign Language in the Middle East and North Africa: Host-Grounded Study Abroad Discourses
Zakaria Fahmi; Dakota Liska
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, v36 n1 p384-417 2024
Following the 9/11 tragedies, the interest in Arabic language and culture in nontraditional destinations such as MENA (Middle East & North Africa) has become vastly obscured with sociocultural and political issues. The mandate to maintain national security served to designate the language and its destinations critical, producing the hegemony of a political rationality that thrives on the globalist commodification of language and risks the homogenization of world cultures. To interrogate these essentialist discourses and others, we examine the ideologies underlying MENA host-grounded discourses to discern the valorization of the language in those destinations, as steered by the needs of globalization and power relations. Drawing upon an adapted, complementary multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach, the current study analyzes the linguistic and visual resources of three study abroad (SA) programs' websites. We argue that the orientalist gaze is bidirectional within the host and U.S. based discourse for matters of sociopolitical and economic interdependencies and that joint constructions of global hierarchies and economic inaccessibilities remain prevalent.
Descriptors: Power Structure, Discourse Analysis, Global Approach, Arabic, Web Sites, Second Language Learning, Study Abroad, Social Attitudes, Political Attitudes, Economic Factors, Foreign Countries, Terrorism, Language Enrollment, Second Language Instruction, Commercialization, Program Descriptions
Frontiers Journal. Dickinson College P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013. Tel: 717-254-8858; Fax: 717-245-1677; Web site: https://www.frontiersjournal.org/index.php/Frontiers
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Middle East; Africa; Egypt (Cairo); Jordan; Morocco
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A