CURRENT EVENTS IN THE ARAB WORLD

This course provides an opportunity for students to explore the current events taking place in the Middle East in a unique fashion that combines history, politics, and culture. Throughout the course, we will look at a variety of written documents and visual media in order to deepen our understanding of the Middle East. The ultimate objective of this course is to build the background knowledge and critical skills necessary for students to engage in more nuanced and informed discussions about the Middle East.

Student input is expected to influence potential units and topics to round out the course.

Students are expected to use complex grammatical structures and actively controlled vocabulary base to carry out conversations and write compositions on a variety of familiar topics. In the writing skill, students are expected to write paragraphs utilizing the most frequently used syntactic structures. Moreover, they should be competent in reading and understanding primary source Arabic materials of limited complexity on familiar subjects.

The goals of this class, again, are to help you increase your vocabulary, develop your four skills especially the spoken and the written one, and to complete the mastery of the fundamental syntactical and morphological structures which the instructor deems to be essential to an understanding of modern literary Arabic.

Driven by the focus on communicative proficiency and the goal of functional competency, this class is designed to build on the Arabic communicative language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural competence using a variety of vocabulary drills, grammar activities and conversation task assignments.

It is an integrated course, including study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and some Media Arabic. There will be a heavy focus on the authentic materials.