The American University in Cairo Press From Reading to Writing, Volume 2: An Advanced to Superior Course for Arabic Heritage Learners

The second volume in our flagship series designed for heritage students and advanced learners of Arabic offers a comprehensive approach to teaching reading and writing skills From Reading to Writing is a content- and task-based textbook for students of Arabic as a heritage language at advanced and superior levels, aimed at developing learners’ key language skills, especially reading and writing. Although heritage learners can often communicate in colloquial Arabic through exposure to the spoken language at home or in their country of residence, they equally as often face fundamental problems in reading and writing, as well as in speaking, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Through authentic texts, carefully chosen to represent the lived realities of the language, supported by a range of tasks, this book seeks to develop heritage learners’ communication skills to meet the practical requirements of university study and the modern-day workplace. The topics covered also offer intellectually stimulating content to learners while connecting them in a meaningful way to Arab culture and society. The authors developed the course content with their students for over a decade and have designed the tasks in this book with the notion that language acquisition is not just a set of rules but an interactive process that depends on performing different tasks in multiple contexts. The tasks include prereading and intensive reading activities; comprehension questions; writing, listening, and grammar exercises; and vocabulary building, as well as higher-order questions designed to promote critical thinking skills. The majority of the writing and listening tasks focus on group work to encourage students to collaborate and engage in the learning process. From Reading to Writing, Volume 2 is also suitable for foreign-language learners of Arabic at the intermediate and advanced levels and native Arabic speakers enrolled at Arab universities.