Please join us for our Brown Bag lecture on Thursday, December 4th from 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m in Dow 100. This week's presenter is Jonas Elboutsy:
Title: Reimagining Literature Teaching Through Multiliteracies Approach
In the multiliteracy approach, there are four major types of curricular components framing the choice and design of materials and activities: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. This book talk focuses on Exploring Contemporary Arabic Novels for Advanced Students of Arabic: Voices from the Arab Gulf Countries, a literature-focused textbook designed for an advanced Arabic language course. Adopting the multiliteracies approach, the textbook emphasizes the active use of Modern Standard Arabic through engaging activities and materials in conjunction with a variety of multimodal texts. As such, the textbook aims not only to develop an advanced-level competence in language skills, but also to foster students’ ability to analyze and interpret, to construct knowledge, and to (re)design different multimodal texts. The ultimate objective is to help students acquire transferable skills to enable them to communicate in different multimodal contexts and to perform multimodal tasks for different academic, professional, and personal purposes (Allen & Paesani 2010; Tricamo 2021).
Teaching Arabic through literary texts, along with multimodal texts, accomplishes two goals. It naturally assists students in advancing their speaking, reading, listening, and writing skills, as any complex texts will, and it furthers students’ cultural competence, critical thinking, and multimodal critical literacy by introducing students to a diverse body of literary works and to other written and spoken discourses.
