I love my topic and I will make you love it.

Over the past sixteen years as Senior Lecturer of Arabic Language and Culture at the University of Virginia and, since 2015, as Assistant Professor of Arabic at Wake Forest University, I have offered more than 78 courses covering first, second, third, and fourth-year levels of Arabic language and literature. In all of these classes, my teaching has been influenced by developments in language pedagogy and socio-cultural studies. I strive to equip my undergraduate students with the tools required to meet the goals of Arabic as a Foreign Language and Arab Socio-cultural Studies. In Arabic pedagogy, I combine the best practices of those two fields in order to use foreign language teaching to serve the larger end of scholarly Arabic studies. In collaboration with my senior colleague in the Arabic program, I focus on formal Arabic in the first two years of study, usually postponing Arabic dialect until after the second year. This way, students can travel to the Arab world with a good background for building proficiency in a particular dialect. For students not interested in travel to the Arab world, formal Arabic remains the most fruitful choice for accessing modern media, formal correspondence, legal matters, and both premodern and modern literatures. My general communicative strategy in my language courses is based on a friendly, conversational approach, beginning every class with a discussion of ordinary day-to-day matters and news of the day. Small-group discussions, oral interviews, and presentations are often assigned, which allows for a more comfortable student-teacher relationship, which in turn facilitates a variety of more meaningful and edifying interactions outside the classroom. In first and second-year courses, I try to clarify the massive confusions about the basic operation of Arabic grammar that usually frustrates students in their earliest encounters with Arabic. The premedical, science, and business students I teach are accustomed to well-organized textbooks, with a level of clarity unmatched by the handful of current Arabic language texts available in English. My passion for teaching and for alleviating students’ frustration led me to write the shortest available summary explaining Arabic syntax in English. The summary is entitled “Axiomatizing Elementary Arabic Syntax,” it was published in the International Journal for Arabic Linguistics. This work emulates the method Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) employed to unify the diversity of modern