Pedagogical innovation and community building
by Dr. Dina Roginsky, Yale University, Senior Lector I & Sarab Al Ani, Yale University, Senior Lector II
Hebrew and Arabic are closely related Semitic languages with strong historic cultural connections, yet their speakers today lack communication for mainly geo-political reasons. In our course the two languages and speakers come together to promote shared language learning and cultural communication.
About the presenters
Dina Roginsky
Dina Roginsky’s research interests focus on the intersection between the sociology of culture, history, politics, and performance. Her doctoral dissertation, “Performing Israeliness,” analyzes the one-hundred-year social and ideological history of the Israeli folk dance movement.
She teaches the courses Israeli Popular Music, Hebrew in a Changing World, State and Society in Israel, Israel in Ideology and Practice: Past and Present, and Academic Texts in Modern Hebrew, in addition to modern Hebrew language courses. Before joining Yale she taught at Tel-Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the University of Toronto.
Roginsky is a co-editor of the book Dance Discourse in Israel, which explores the field of Israeli dance research. She publishes on culture, folklore, dance, and ethnicity and is currently working on a book titled Ideology in Motion.
https://nelc.yale.edu/people/dina-roginsky
Sarab Al Ani
Sarab Al Ani’s research interests focus on the use of technology in language teaching, overcoming challenges that face students of Arabic in the U.S., the means to achieve desired language skills with minimum difficulty, and optimal testing methods. She has taught Arabic at the Middlebury Language Summer Schools and Michigan State University and linguistics, morphology, and phonology at the University of Baghdad. At Yale, she teaches all levels of Arabic. Her advanced courses include Modern Arabic Political Thought, Business Arabic, Media Arabic, and Levantine Dialect. She has also worked in areas related to ESL and foreign language pedagogy, as a professional Arabic-English translator, and as a testing consultant and external examiner with several programs such as FLAS.
Recent Workshops and Presentations
OPI for Arabic Language Learners, Rhodes College, January 2022
OPI Workshop, Arabic Flagship Program, Indiana University, January 2022
Expo Lingua 2022, Conference for Arabic Language Educators in Germany, March 2022
Mulitlingual Approaches in World Language Education: Perspectives from Arabic Learning Contexts, November 2021
How the Covid-19 Pandemic Offers Opportunities for Student Engagement in Language, MESA, November 2021
Leveraging Teacher Immediacy to Enhance Class Community, ACTFL Virtual Conference, November 2021