Assistant Professor of Professional Practice
- Office
- McCone Building M235
- Tel
- (831) 647-4601
- rissa@miis.edu
Rana Issa teaches Arabic language and culture, including courses such as Arabic, Arabic Speaking Countries, and Media in the Arabic World. She has extensive experience coordinating language programs, translating documents, and working in a professional Arabic-speaking environment.
Rana has received the Commandant Coin of Excellence for superior dedication to teaching and curriculum development in the Defense Language Institute.
Courses Taught
Courses offered in the past four years.
- Current term ●
- Upcoming term(s) ○
ARLA 8214 - Arabic Speaking Countries I ●
This course will be a study of the basic information related to the Arab world and Middle East. The course focuses on enhancing abilities to communicate personal meaning effectively and satisfy personal needs and social demands to survive in an Arabic-speaking environment. Students acquire the ability to describe fluently themselves, their homes, towns, countries, provide and request basic information, and talk about their daily activities, jobs, education, interests and personal preferences, as well as physical and social needs, such as food, shopping, travel and lodging.
Fall 2016 - MIIS, Fall 2017 - MIIS, Spring 2018 - MIIS
ARLA 8227 - Modern History of Arab World ●
Spring 2018 - MIIS
ARLA 8251 - Religion/EthnicGroups-ArabWrld
This course explores the diversity of the Middle East with a focus on religion and ethnic groups. The course addresses, modern history; basic beliefs and practices; identity; religion and politics; culture and tradition.
Fall 2016 - MIIS, Fall 2017 - MIIS
ARLA 8312 - Events in the Arab World
CURRENT EVENTS IN THE ARAB WORLD
This course provides an opportunity for students to explore the current events taking place in the Middle East in a unique fashion that combines history, politics, and culture. Throughout the course, we will look at a variety of written documents and visual media in order to deepen our understanding of the Middle East. The ultimate objective of this course is to build the background knowledge and critical skills necessary for students to engage in more nuanced and informed discussions about the Middle East.
Student input is expected to influence potential units and topics to round out the course.
Students are expected to use complex grammatical structures and actively controlled vocabulary base to carry out conversations and write compositions on a variety of familiar topics. In the writing skill, students are expected to write paragraphs utilizing the most frequently used syntactic structures. Moreover, they should be competent in reading and understanding primary source Arabic materials of limited complexity on familiar subjects.
The goals of this class, again, are to help you increase your vocabulary, develop your four skills especially the spoken and the written one, and to complete the mastery of the fundamental syntactical and morphological structures which the instructor deems to be essential to an understanding of modern literary Arabic.
Driven by the focus on communicative proficiency and the goal of functional competency, this class is designed to build on the Arabic communicative language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural competence using a variety of vocabulary drills, grammar activities and conversation task assignments.
It is an integrated course, including study of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and some Media Arabic. There will be a heavy focus on the authentic materials.
Fall 2017 - MIIS
ARLA 8252 - Arabic Media
Arabic Media is a course that is designed for students at the intermediate level. It introduces the language of print, internet, TV news media to students of Arabic and provides them with the basic skills and vocabulary required for understanding the language of newspapers, magazines, television, and internet news. It will cover a wide range of topics such as business, politics, current events, society, culture, and environment.
Spring 2017 - MIIS
ARLA 8321 - Middle East After Arab Spring
Massive outpourings of Tunisians in December 2010 represented at first genuine popular protests against rotten regimes, total power of the ruling elites, corruption, unemployment, social injustice, and the expanding gap between rich and poor segments of the society.
After almost 5 years since the beginning of the so-called “Arab Spring,” which for many turned suddenly into “winter”, what did the wind of change bring? This course will explore some of the challenges the Arab revolutions are facing such as the rise of authoritarianism and religious extremism, massive displacements, the emergence of multiple regional civil wars, mounting regional instability, economic and demographic decline of Arab countries, and ethno-religious sectarian strife.
Spring 2017 - MIIS
ARLA 8398 - Security & Refugees
Spring 2017 - MIIS
Areas of Interest
Arabic language, Arabic culture.
Academic Degrees
- MA in Teaching Foreign Languages (Arabic), Monterey Institute of International Studies
- BA in Business Administration, University of Balamand, Elkoura, Lebanon