About Maryah

I decided to learn Arabic by joining the Peace Corps in the beautiful Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan because I wanted the language skills to help Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. That career didn’t work out, but I fell in love with second language teaching.

In the course of more than a decade of teaching English to (mostly) Arabs, and Arabic to (mostly) English speakers, I couldn’t help but see a vast gap in the kinds and quality of curriculum available for English as an Additional Language (EAL) vs. Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL), and the disparity in research underpinning that gap.

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This brought me to my PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, where I am pursuing skills that will help me develop more effective AFL materials and curriculum, with a particular focus on the first semester and year of Arabic studies.

At the university, I have two focuses: my language acquisition research interests, and my Arabic teaching priorities.

As a researcher, I’m curious about how children acquire Arabic as a first language, particularly verb morphosyntax.

If we can establish an acquisition order for Arabic as a first language, can it help us organize more effective curricula for teaching AFL, as has been in the case for EAL?

As an educator, I’m interested in inclusion and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) across many facets of student diversity.

How do we ensure that first-year students, including first generation college students, are set up to succeed in the university environment and the language learning classroom?
How do we manage the needs and insecurities of heritage speakers of Arabic dialects who may not be literate in Arabic, tajweed students who are literate in Arabic but can’t communicate in it, and second language learners who are neither speakers of Arabic nor literate in Arabic?
How do we ensure that queer and nonbinary students feel included in a profoundly binary language like Arabic?
How do we accommodate students with disabilities, and especially language-specific disabilities like dyslexia?