The Qatar Foundation International (QFI) has awarded the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature $75,000 to help fund graduate fellowships for its new collaborative degree track with the School of Education: the Master of Arts in Teaching Arabic.
Dr. Giselle Khoury, Head of the Arabic Language Program, is principal investigator on the grant and was also the prime mover behind the creation of the degree track. Her collaborator in developing the winning grant proposal was CAS Assistant Dean and Professor of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature Gisela Hoecherl-Alden.
In launching the new degree track, BU has made a pioneering commitment to the preparation of teachers of Arabic, a glaring need in US education. The new Master of Arts in Teaching Arabic will be a national leader in the effort to meet the demand for trained and licensed middle and high school Arabic teachers in the United States.
“We are uniquely positioned at Boston University to meet this demand because of the strength of our language and language education programs and our strong ties to school systems that seek to provide Arabic language courses for their students,” said Clinical Assistant Professor Julie Coppola of the School of Education, who is collaborating with her CAS colleagues on the degree program.