Davis, CA — The University of California Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching has been awarded a U.S. Department of Education grant to create a year-long distance learning course, "Arabic Without Walls," which will allow students to study Arabic language and culture, anyplace, anytime.

Arabic is the primary language of one of the most geo-politically critical regions in the world, claims over 250 million native speakers and is the religious home language of an additional 1 billion people. Despite both the surging popularity of Arabic language and culture and the need for more government experts and academics trained in this important field, only 5,000 U.S. students were studying Arabic, as of 1998.

From its base at UC Berkeley, "Arabic Without Walls" will deliver a distance-learning Arabic language and culture course for students on other UC campuses and eventually for students at colleges throughout the country that do not offer an adequate program of study in Arabic. Currently at UC, Arabic is only taught on the Berkeley, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses.

The course will allow undergraduate and graduate students in fields ranging from Middle East area studies to religious studies to political science the opportunity to pursue the study of Arabic in a flexible, Web-based forum that highlights native speakers and is focused on developing listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.

Faculty will also be able to access the state-of-the-art supplementary materials being produced for the course, and upper-division and graduate students will have the opportunity to serve as teaching assistants in the program.

The program is modeled after the successful "Spanish Without Walls" course, a pioneering effort in language distance learning, now being offered through UC Davis extension for its third consecutive year.

"Arabic Without Walls" is expected to begin in the fall of 2005, and in its first year reach an estimated 60 students.

"Arabic Without Walls" is made possible by a prestigious $452,600 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. The program will be co-authored, developed and distributed over a period of three years by the UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching and the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC) at Brigham Young University.

The co-principal investigators of the project are Robert J. Blake, director of the consortium, and Kirk Belnap of the NMELRC. Under the direction of Blake and Belnap, a team of Arabic experts including Sonia S'hiri of UC Berkeley, Mahmoud Al-Batal of Emory University and Muhammad Eissa of NMELRC will produce the DVD-ROM master class and the Web-based materials that will form the cornerstone of the project.

Established in 2000 by the UC Office of the President, the UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching is a systemwide effort to maximize the University of California's resources in foreign languages. Its steering committee includes representatives from the language faculty of eight UC campuses.

For more information on "Arabic Without Walls," please go to: http://uccllt.ucdavis.edu

Contact: uccllt@ucdavis.edu / telephone: (530) 752-2719

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