Vande Berg, Michael, Jeffrey Connor-Linton, and R. Michael Paige
The College’s Arabic Program is considered among the best in the country. After four semesters of rigorous preparation, students head abroad for an intensive semester led by members of the BYU faculty. During Fall semester 2011, Dr. Dilworth Parkinson and Dr. Kirk Belnap accompanied fifty-two students to Amman, Jordan. Dr. Parkinson oversaw the most successful implementation to date of a highly effective method he has developed to help students efficiently acquire both accuracy and fluency in reading the Arab press. An unprecedented proportion of the students achieved advanced-level pro ciency, as measured by a nationally- recognized test, with the best students at or near the “superior” level.
Dr. Belnap, who directs the National Middle East Language Resource Center, accompanied the group as part of Project Perseverance, a pioneering research effort funded by the US Department of Education and BYU, to help students overcome the stresses and anxiety typical of immersion study and become effective self-regulating language learners. Other research team members include the College’s own Dr. Dan Dewey (Linguistics) and Dr. Jennifer Bown (Germanic and Slavic) and Dr. Patrick Ste en of BYU’s Behavioral Medicine Research Center, as well as Dr. Madeline Ehrman, former direc- tor of research at the Foreign Service Institute, and Dr. Andrew Cohen of the University of Minnesota, an authority on language learning strategies.
Content-based learning is a cornerstone of the BYU study abroad program, an approach recently found to contribute to significantly higher language proficiency gains during study abroad (Vande Berg, Connor-Linton, and Paige, 2009). Students met daily with professors from the Qasid Institute to discuss current issues in Arab society, many of them connected with the unfolding events. These teachers devised surveys that helped the students simultaneously improve their Arabic and engage in discussions that gave them a much more nuanced understanding of Arab culture, including complex topics such as attitudes about women wearing the veil.
For the first time since the program began in 1989, some of the students attended a regular class for Arab students at the University of Jordan, a Political Science class taught by Dr. Faisal Al-Rfouh. One day, the professor commented at length about the Palestinians’ U.N. gambit, about which he had just published an editorial in a major newspaper—which students then read and came back and discussed with him in the next class. As they listened day after day to his commentary on developments, they found themselves with a front- row seat to history in the making. is opportunity stretched high aptitude students much more than ever before.