Bio

I joined Carnegie Mellon University after more than twenty years of teaching all skills, all levels and many content courses at the American University in Cairo, Georgetown town University, Washington, D.C. and Middlebury College. My experience included many international activities as being the President of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic (AATA), the Executive Director of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) and many other positions. The main attraction for me to teach at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMUQ), aside from being a very prestigious university was that it was offering Arabic for the first time. A new experience I looked for.

Teaching is a continuous process of learning on the side of the instructor as well. A professor is a lifetime student who should not stop learning till the end of one's career. The most important aspect in teaching is that students learn. We provide them with the tools by which their learning would become continuous inside and outside of the classroom since most of the learning takes place outside the classroom.

Research is the heart of teaching. It provides professors with deep insights in many issues related to teaching and also keeps the professor updated with the field.The research questions I tried to answer were always points raised during the classrooms. Moreover, they were points that had literature gap in the Arabic sociolinguistic field which is directly related to teaching Arabic as a native or foreign language.

Department Member Since 2009