Director

Mahmoud Abdalla earned
his M.A. and Ph.D. in applied linguistics at Essex University and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. He has taught and lectured extensively on linguistics, Arabic language, and Arab culture and media in several universities and academic institutions in Egypt, Europe, and the United States. He is currently assistant professor and coordinator of the Arabic language program in the Department of Near Eastern and Asian Studies at Wayne State University. His research interests include second language acquisition, discourse analysis, dialectology, second language pedagogy, and language culture and identity. He is highly involved in teacher training and is a member of several academic associations, one of which is the American Association of Teachers of Arabic on whose executive board he presently serves. In 1999, he received the outstanding teaching award from the Council of Students of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He also is a certified Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) tester through the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL).