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What to Teach: Bilingual Arabic Teachers' Beliefs and Stances about Pedagogical Translanguaging and Transdialecting

Summary

The study asks how bilingual teachers of Arabic in the US Midwest think about mixing languages and Arabic varieties in class. In US programmes Modern Standard Arabic (Fusha) usually wins out over learners' home dialects, which disadvantages heritage learners. Deiri interviewed seven bi/multilingual Arabic teachers working in K-12 schools and community settings in Ohio. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in both English and Arabic, under a "radical intimate multilingual inquiry" approach that relies on the researcher's insider position. The paper also introduces a new term, transdialecting: fluid movement among Arabic varieties, treated as a subset of translanguaging, which covers movement between Arabic and English.

The teachers' stances ranged from cautious curiosity about translanguaging to offering concrete classroom examples of both practices. One teacher could also be flexible for one learning goal and strictly monolingual for another. The author argues that teacher education should name and support transdialecting. This would make Arabic teaching more equitable for heritage learners with diverse dialects and challenge the habit of using Fusha as a single default.

Key points

  • Participants: seven bilingual Arabic teachers in Ohio, teaching K-12 and community-based classes, interviewed in English and Arabic.
  • Terminology:
    • Translanguaging means crossing between languages, such as Arabic and English.
    • Transdialecting means crossing between Fusha, regional dialects and colloquial Arabic, and is framed as part of translanguaging.
  • Teachers' practices differed in how they used translation, how they confirmed meaning and how they checked whether students understood.
  • Real classrooms are dialectally mixed, with Sudanese, Somali, Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian and Levantine Arabic among others. This undermines the claim that MSA is the natural shared ground for US students.
  • The author names two barriers: few culturally relevant ways to learn Arabic, and monolingual ideology that favours Fusha. She also calls for closer cooperation between university world-language programmes and language-education programmes.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Keeping mixing between languages separate from variation inside one language yields two distinct, analysable categories instead of one blurred notion of "mixing." — For Mova (tree): When converting between UD dialects or parsing non-standard text, tag English-internal variety and register shifts separately from foreign-language insertions, so each can get its own handling and error analysis.
  • I2. A teacher's openness to mixing was tied to particular learning objectives rather than being one global attitude. — For Mova (learn): Report evaluation per phenomenon or skill instead of a single score, since a component can be robust in one area and rigid in another.
  • I3. The assumption that a standard variety is the common ground falls apart once you look at who is actually in the room. — For Mova (tokens): Check tagger and lemmatizer assumptions against the real input mix, such as children's or dialect-marked writing in school-course texts, instead of assuming standard English.
  • I4. Teachers used translation and meaning confirmation as quick checks of whether a learner had understood. — For Mova (back): Render the meaning graph back into a paraphrase and compare it with the source, as an explainable self-check that a text was understood.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2458/cms.6476

@article{deiri2024what,
  title = {{What to Teach: Bilingual Arabic Teachers' Beliefs and Stances about Pedagogical Translanguaging and Transdialecting}},
  author = {Deiri, Youmna},
  journal = {Critical Multilingualism Studies 11},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.2458/cms.6476},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2458/cms.6476}
}

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