LOS ANGELES – Coming of age during the Sept. 11 attacks and war in Iraq, some of the students in the University of California, Los Angeles’ advanced Arabic class want to launch diplomatic or military careers. Others seek to delve into the Quran and Islamic culture. And some simply love a mind-stretching, tongue-twisting challenge.
No matter the reasons, they help fuel a trend that has made Arabic the fastest-growing spoken language of study at U.S. colleges and universities.
Just as the teaching of Russian took off after the launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, more colleges than ever are starting or expanding courses in Arabic. Schools report waiting lists for classes.
In the next school year, colleges are expected to see a flurry of initiatives to increase the study of Arabic, aided in part by President Bush’s recent pledge to obtain more money for so-called strategic languages.
“The importance of Arabic as a language is not going to go away, no matter what happens in the Middle East. Even if things cool down there – which I think is impossible in the immediate future – it will be an important language,” said Zoe Griffith, a history and Middle East studies major from Berkeley in that advanced UCLA class. Griffith, 21, is considering a career in human rights law.
But students face many challenges in learning Arabic, which comprises a small fraction of the nation’s language study programs.
There is a shortage of well-trained teachers and a lack of credentialing programs. Also, teachers and students say relatively high dropout rates reflect the difficulties of its right-to-left cursive script, the many dialects and pronunciation that is unfamiliar to Western ears.
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