Arabic Workshop: Intertextuality Interpretation as Collaborative Activity

Arabic Workshop: Intertextuality interpretation as Collaborative Activity
Presenter: Abeer Aloush (UPENN)
Location: Fisher – Bennett Hall, Room TBA, 3340 Walnut Street Philadelphia PA, 19104
About the Workshop:

Current reading devices allow multiple readers to read the same text together, annotate the text, and share their annotations. The resulting practice is referred to as social reading. This new literacy practice violates many readers expectations of what it means to read based on a shared print culture (Baron, 2013). This presentation frames social reading in terms of a new participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009) in which interpretive practices long associated with the individual become a collaborative, group activity. The impact of social reading has stirred much academic controversy.

In this workshop, Arabic instructors will discuss how to expand the vocabulary of new learners and build a thread of reading based on natural visual interpretation. Students can produce intensively Arabic threads in a minimal time to practice the language. The workshop will show different models of using meta-reading at a variety of levels: Elementary and Intermediate; Some digital examples will be shared as well.

About the Presenter:

Abeer Aloush has a PhD from SUNY, The University at Albany; her degree is informed by the interdisciplinary field of Culture Studies, Comparative Literature and Linguistics. She specializes in the identity struggle of minorities in France and Egypt and she is interested in analyzing different phenomena related to integration, multiculturalism, citizenship, alterity, bilingualism, duality and identity struggle. She is also interested in the sociolinguistics to explain the phenomenon of Franco-Arab hip-hop of the second generation to parent Muslim immigrants as acoustically violent affirmation of visibility. Dr. Aloush is a formal scholar at Oxford Brooks University where she attended two years ago a field research to study the problematic conditions of Muslim immigrants in the French slums. Also, she has a Post-graduate degree in Digital Humanities from University of Victoria, British Columbia with specialty on Teaching Second Language through Games and Digital Curation. Also, Dr. Aloush has a Certificate from University of Pennsylvania in Instruction through Technology and Online Teaching and she has an MA in Translation from Cairo University. She has an extensive experience in teaching Arabic through applying new teaching methodologies and technology. Before University of Pennsylvania, she used to work at Columbia University and NYU. She teaches since six years all levels of Arabic at University of Pennsylvania (from elementary to advanced) and teaches Media and Reading in Social Sciences courses as well. Also, she established teaching Arabic online at Penn since 2012 where she receives students from other universities as well. She designed and developed the online teaching by creating a virtual environment of learning in the purpose of excelling in Arabic. Since 2010 and to present, she is serving as a representative of the Critical Language Scholarship for the area of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and a reader/juror for the committee of selection. She represents CLS in all the critical languages (i.e. Arabic, Chinese, Pashtu, Japanese, Farsi, Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Indonesian, Azerbaijani, Hindi and Russian). Since 2013, Dr. Aloush is an OPI evaluator of FLAS and the Arabic Lead of Fulbright Foreign Teaching Language Assistants. She is certified for Teaching Languages for Purposes by the National Language Center located at University of Hawaii through the project she designed for Law students called “Legal Arabic for Courts and Ethics”. She works on NA (Needs analysis) to offer Arabic for different purposes such as law, medical, IT, banking, and so forth. She offers continuously monthly workshops and talks to train other instructors at University of Pennsylvania and other universities on teaching through the use of technology, teaching online and Digital Humanities. She represents University of Pennsylvania in national and international conferences to share new applied methodologies in teaching Arabic. Her last project is entitled “Multicultural and Interactive Arabic Digital Edutainment.” The envisaged project provides a schematic overview of alternatives to edutainment for learning the Arabic language. The project will expand the experience of personal growth through requiring conscious reflection on language by trying to push the boundaries of digital gaming. It will expand to other language as a second phase to train learners on Hebrew, Persian, Old Turkish (Ottoman).