ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on teaching Arabic in the United States. Enrollments in Arabic have leveled off the all-time high achieved in the years immediately following 2001; however, Arabic is now firmly established in the top ten foreign languages studied in US institutions of higher education. Full "communicative competence" became the ostensible aim of many Arabic teaching programs, but materials and methods have remained centered primarily on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). A mainstream Arabic teaching faced adapting to the audio-lingual approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, reverse privileging undermines a key skill in spoken Arabic: the ability to calibrate and mutually adapt discourse formality to different sociocultural levels and situations, and to code-mix between vernacular and literary variants when appropriate and necessary. Diglossia, moreover, embodies not only linguistic differences, but also reflects significant cognitive, cultural, and affective distinctions in Arab societies.
