Mainstreaming Arabic Second Language Acquisition Research
Abstract
The papers included in this issue represent the current dominant trend in Arabic second language acquisition research in the United States: micro-level research designs, combining quantitative and qualitative research tools to address specific empirical questions aimed to improve the quality of instruction, learning opportunities, and teaching materials. This trend draws on theoretical models of the acquisition of a wide range of languages to demonstrate that the acquisition of Arabic, despite its structural and sociolinguistic “unique” properties, follows universal cognitive patterns, even if some of these properties might require special attention. At the same time, these research designs, while attempting to better understand the processes involved in the acquisition of particular linguistic features of Arabic, feed back into generalizable theoretical models of language acquisition beyond Arabic.
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