It's the Heyday of Arabic, but It May Not Be Enough
By SAM DILLON
Published in The New York Times, November 16, 2003

For Americans, Arabic is a difficult language. It has some unfamiliar throaty sounds, a vast and ancient vocabulary, script that reads from right to left and dialects so distinct that native speakers from Morocco, Yemen and Iraq often cannot understand one another.Nevertheless, the United States, with much of its military, intelligence and diplomatic energy focused on the Mideast crisis, needs more Arabic speakers, and it is getting them. Scores of colleges and universities have added or expanded Arabic course offerings, and a new study has provided the first broad statistical evidence that more students than ever are enrolling in Arabic classes.
But whether the boom will last is another matter. The number of Arabic students remains small. America's new generation of would-be Arabic speakers must show that they can muster the discipline necessary for the long march to fluency. And questions have been raised about the quality of the teaching.
"I have serious concerns about what's going on in some of these classrooms," said R. Kirk Belnap, professor of Arabic at Brigham Young University and the director of a federally financed consortium, the National Middle East Language Resource Center. "There are a lot of counterproductive teaching methods that don't help students learn.`
The new survey, released this month by the Modern Language Association, makes clear that current student interest dwarfs all previous fads in Arabic study, including the boomlet that registered on some campuses at the time of the first gulf war.
And separate data the center has collected indicates that students pursuing the language at universities with long-established Arabic departments are showing increased tenacity since the Sept. 11 attacks made its study a national priority.
The M.L.A. survey collected data on foreign language enrollment from fall 2002 from 780 colleges and universities. It showed that 1.4 million students are studying at least one foreign language, more than in any year since 1972.
The survey found that 10,596 students were studying Arabic, compared with 5,505 in 1998, the last time the association collected such figures.
Still, Arabic remains outside the mainstream of language study. Fewer than 1 percent of all students enrolled in a foreign language course are studying Arabic. Nine of 10 colleges and universities do not offer a Arabic course, the survey found.
Even an arcane language like ancient Greek is taught at more than twice as many colleges as Arabic, the survey found, although that is changing. In 1998, only 157 colleges and universities offered Arabic. By 2002, an additional 77 did. Opportunities to learn it are opening faster than for any other language except Spanish.
But growth is creating its own problems. Many schools adding Arabic courses are hiring native speakers as instructors, even if they do not have a degree or teaching experience, and the salaries may be too low to make sure they stay.
Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, the University of North Alabama in Florence began offering a beginning Arabic course. T. Craig Christy, the chairman of the foreign languages department, said that North Alabama hired an Egyptian-born man working at a local import-export company to teach conversational Arabic twice a week. He acknowledged that the school is paying the instructor little.
"Compensation is minimal," he said. "It's more an act of charity by this instructor."
The course has attracted half a dozen or so students in each of three fall terms, he said. But so far not enough students have expressed interest in second-year Arabic to warrant offering a higher-level course. This suggests that at least at some universities, students are acquainting themselves with Arabic, then dropping out.
Attrition is a factor in the study of any language. Richard D. Lambert, former director of the National Foreign Language Center, a private organization based in Washington, said in a 1992 study that because foreign language requirements were reduced in the 1960's and 1970's, attrition is predictable. "It can almost be called a natural law," Dr. Lambert said. "In both high school and college, 50 percent of the students at each level drop out at the next level."
That is, if 100 students sign up to study French I, only 50 students enroll in French II a year later, and 25 students in French III the year after that.
The Foreign Service Institute at the State Department puts Arabic in its "super-hard" category, along with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, said James E. Bernhardt, chairman of the institute's department of Arabic and Asian languages. The institute estimates that bright students need at least 88 weeks of full-time training to reach entry-level professional proficiency, he said. By comparison, to achieve the same proficiency in Hebrew, which the institute rates as "hard," requires 44 weeks, Mr. Bernhardt said.
So far, however, recent statistics from the National Middle East Language Resource Center show that attrition among Arabic learners appears to be lower than Lambert's law would predict.
At nine universities with long-established Arabic programs — Emory, Harvard, New York University, Princeton, University of California at Los Angeles, Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Utah and University of Washington — 61 percent of students who completed first year Arabic in June 2002 enrolled in second-year courses in the fall, and 63 percent who completed second-year courses enrolled for the third year.
But the persistence could soon create a problem, Dr. Belnap said. The normal next step for a student who has taken three years of Arabic is to study abroad, most frequently in Cairo. But the main advanced Arabic program there, financed by the United States government, would not now be able to accommodate the large numbers of qualified students likely to seek enrollment within a couple of years, he said.
"We have a serious bottleneck developing," Dr. Belnap said.