ABSTRACT
As I write this chapter on teaching Arabic in the United States, enrollments are at an all-time high. The Modern Language Association statistics register a 92.3% increase in Arabic enrollments across the board since 1960 (from 541 to 10,584) and a 40.2% increase just since 1998. 1 Traditional questions asked of Arabic students have now shifted from “Why study Arabic?” to “How long does it take to become flu-ent?” As usual, Americans′ motivations for foreign language study are pragmatic and functional. As long as the Arabic language was considered of marginal impor-tance to the lives of most Americans, it remained a marginal field of study and interest to the American public; now that it is perceived by that public as a strate-gically useful and even critical language to know, the reasons for study are no longer unclear. 2
