By D. D. GUTTENPLAN on New York Times, June 11 –
At Northwestern University in Qatar the administration recently came up against a surprising problem: How to improve students’ Arabic.
The overseas campus of the renowned university in Evanston, Illinois, attracts students from 30 countries for its programs in communications and journalism, popular majors in the hometown of Al Jazeera, the satellite broadcasting network. Although courses are given in English, about 60 percent of students speak some form of Arabic. “But most of them don’t speak Arabic well enough to appear on Al Jazeera,” said Everette E. Dennis, the school’s dean.