Meet Nesrine Basheer, Flagship GA

This post was written by Nesrine Basheer, a Ph.D. student in Second Language Acquisition and Graduate Assistant with the Arabic Flagship Program.


What am I doing at UMD? Well, I’m a first year PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition program. In this program you can study (obviously) how people learn or acquire a second language. You can also research what teaching methodology works best for a certain group of students. Or maybe you want to find out whether Arabic words are stored in the same place in the brain as English. Me? I’m interested in all of the above. But since I hope to eventually graduate, I’ll have to stick to only one area.


A couple of months ago, one of my students said to me “I just finished my OPI exam and I’m not quite sure why the interviewer insisted that I speak in Modern Standard Arabic! So frustrating.” Exactly! This is what I’d like to work on: Assessing Arabic language proficiency. I can’t blame the interviewer because in order to measure something you need to have a clear definition first... and good luck trying to define "Arabic oral proficiency!" Having observed the recent developments in the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language, however, I’ve become more optimistic. There have been successful attempts to get one score that would tell us something about learners’ ‘real-life’ proficiency, which as you sure know, doesn’t mean speaking in MSA only. You can definitely do that to show a native speaker that your Arabic is better than theirs, or to ask an Arab girl out and get rejected.


The painful part about my journey towards a that-makes-sense definition of Arabic proficiency is that deep inside (shhhh! Don’t tell my advisor) I’d actually rather go for a bike, work on a photography project, or enjoy a jazz dinner with a friend. Instead I have to sit at the library to convince myself that structural equation modeling, multiple regression, logits, and confirmatory factor analysis make sense. Yes, they sound like statistics because they are.


But, what can I say? I love Arabic and can’t help being a nerd.