By Julie FrenchThe Daily Northwestern
Since 2001, the number of Northwestern students enrolled in Arabic courses has quadrupled to about 100 students, which has led to additional Arabic course offerings and an increased reliance on the program’s two instructors.
Students and faculty in the program said they have begun to notice the challenges caused by the program’s significant growth.
“All the classes are much bigger than any language class should be, especially Arabic,” said Weinberg senior Nayna Gupta, a second-year Arabic student.
There are currently seven sections of Arabic spread across four levels. Gupta’s class is the largest, with 17 registered students.
Lynn Whitcomb, the Arabic language coordinator, said the ideal class size for second-year Arabic is 10 to 12 students. Her colleague Mohammad Abdeljaber advocated class sizes as small as eight.
“The program is growing, and we are trying to accommodate as many students as we can until there are the resources to add a third person,” Abdeljaber said.
But sometimes, they have to “decide to either turn them away or increase the number of students,” he said.
The administration has committed to adding another lecturer in Arabic next year, according to Mary Finn, associate dean of undergraduate academic affairs in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
“The demand is there, and I think we should meet it,” she said. “It’s really important to teach students Arabic.”
But it’s hard to attract applicants for faculty positions in the Arabic program because positions are for lecturers, which means lower pay and no potential for tenure, Whitcomb said.
“It’s difficult to find well-qualified people who can teach a part-time job,” she said. “The likelihood that there will be turnover in the future is high.”
Still, Whitcomb said, the administration has been supportive.
“The administration has tried to respond to our requests, so we just hope that will continue or expand,” she said. “For a lot of schools, to have 15 students in a language class is a great teacher-student ratio. In the context of other schools, we have some things to be thankful for.”
Many universities have added first- and second-year programs, but the third- and fourth-year classes are most important for developing competence, Whitcomb said. This is the first year NU has offered a fourth-level course, and third-level courses are now offered consistently.
“It’s very exciting to have students continuing to that level at all,” she said, “because you don’t make as much progress in the first two years as you would in French or Spanish.”
Upper-level classes increasingly focus on supplementary materials, such as news articles, in addition to the standard curricula, Whitcomb said. This real world exposure helps set NU students apart from their peers at other schools, but the time required to prepare those materials is limited with such a small staff, she said.
Whitcomb said she would eventually like to add more classes, such as a class for native speakers, a fifth-year class for students who study abroad or a course in Arabic literature.
For now, most of the programming expansion will come in Middle East Studies classes, such as history instead of just Arabic, Finn said. But there are still possibilities for expansion within the Arabic program.
“(The Arabic instructors) make the case for the kind of curriculum they want to have, and we respond to it as best we can,” Finn said. “If we’re doing this right, we’re listening to them. We’re not telling them what to do in their curriculum.”
Weinberg junior Neal Suidan, who is currently majoring in Asian and Middle East Studies with an ad hoc major in Arabic, said he would like to see a greater variety in class offerings.
“I was trying to push to get dialectical Arabic,” he said. “The need to study Arabic is growing every day. Sooner or later, (NU is) going to have to increase its faculty and its emphasis on the Middle East.”
Reach Julie French at [email protected].
