Mimouna Festival
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Northwest Labs, Harvard University
52 Oxford Street, Cambridge (Harvard Square)
$30 Young Adult Advanced
$100 Adult
$20 Student (valid ID required)
$40 Young Adult Cash-Only at Door
*Food and bar additional cost – cash only*
Tickets and event schedule at www.NewCenterBoston.org.
The Academy for Arabic Teachers
STARTALK Arabic Teacher Professional
Development Program – Summer 2011
The Academy for Arabic Teachers is an intensive and comprehensive Arabic teacher professional development program at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. The program addresses all key aspects of foreign language instruction, focusing particularly on Arabic as a Foreign Language. The Academy is funded by the highly acclaimed STARTALK program.
Program Dates:
May 15- June 10 (online coursework & 2 weeks in Boston: May 30- June 10)
Stipend:
Participants will be awarded a $500 stipend.
Eligibility:
Application deadline: April 20, 2011
Admission is competitive and seats are limited; early application is encouraged.
For additional information or to download the application form visit www.bu.edu/aat or contact the Program Assistant Director, Amani Abu Shakra, at amani@bu.edu.
Berklee Annual Middle Eastern Festival
Featuring Artist in Residence, Oud and Violin Virtuoso Simon Shaheen,
and the Berklee All Star Middle Eastern Ensemble
Directed by Christiane Karam
Tuesday April 19th
2:15-3:45pm Open Clinic, Cafe 939, Free Admission, Open to the Public
8:15pm Berklee Performance Center Concert, General Admission: $10
Tahrir Square Festival- A Fundraiser for Egypt
Saturday, April 16th 11:00am-3:00pm
MIT Campus-Stratton Student Center
The Lobdell Dining Hall, 84 Mass. Avenue, Cambridge, MA
All proceeds will benefit the Aid Egypt foundation, which provides emergency medical supplies, and humanitarian relief to the people of Egypt and the Nahdet El Mahrousa foundation, which seeks to have a positive impact on Egypt’s development through engaging Egyptian youth.
This event is organized and sponsored by the Egyptian Association at MIT in cooperation with:
“Gender, Social Media, and Recent Revolutions in the Middle East”
April 14th, 7pm
Multi-purpose Room, Sakowich Campus Center
Merrimack College
Egyptian award winning international journalist Mona Eltahawy’s talk on “Gender, Social Media, and Recent Revolutions in the Middle East.” Mona was a guest analyst on “Meet the Press”, one of the many programs she has appeared on.
Inside The Egyptian Revolution: Meet an Egyptian Eyewitness
Monday, April 4, 6 – 7:30 pm
Harvard Graduate School of Education – Askwith Hall, Longfellow Building @ 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA
Sahar El-Nadi, is the creator and director of Don’t Hate, Educate, an award-winning intercultural communication project. She is a writer, photographer and public speaker, as well as a creativity and communication instructor.
If you have any questions, please email som248@mail.harvard.edu or das091@mail.harvard.edu
Miral premieres at the Kendall Square Cinema
The film will run until April 7th.
From Julian Schnabel, director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, comes Miral, the visceral, first-person diary of a young girl (played by Freida Pinto) growing up in East Jerusalem as she confronts the effects of occupation and war in every corner of her life.
Arabian Business just released their list of the world’s 500 most influential Arabs. Topping the list is Prince Alwaleed with Google’s Wael Ghonim taking second place. You can see the entire list by clicking here.
Also included is Raja Shehadeh. We will be hosting Raja as he reads from his new book, a Rift in Time. More details here.
The Oxford Picture Dictionary (OPD), Second Edition (2nd Ed.) is the textbook for our EFL/ESL course at the Center for Arabic Culture (CAC). As of today, April 1, 2011, you can buy it at www.amazon.com for about $14.00 or at a local book shop like the Harvard Cooperative Society (The Coop) in Harvard Square for about $20.00. It is a clear, comprehensive, beautiful, inexpensive, invaluable tool for learning English as a foreign language. There is an English-language-only (monolingual) edition and a series of bi-lingual editions including English-Arabic, English-Spanish, English-Brazilian Portuguese, and many others. In my opinion, it is a “gold mine” for an EFL/ESL student!
The OPD systematically and clearly presents a vocabularly of about 4,000 words, including many in complete sentences, in the following 12 units:
(1) Everyday Language
(2) People
(3) Housing
(4) Food
(5) Clothing
(6) Health
(7) Community
(8) Transportation
(9) Work
(10) Areas of Study
(11) Plants and Animals
(12) Recreation.
Is there anything here you would like to study???
By the way, several of the words and phrases above have an alternative, equivalent term in parentheses (or “round brackets,” as the British would say) after them: (A) The Oxford Picture Dictionary (OPD), (B) Second Edition (2nd Ed.), (C) Center for Arabic Culture (CAC), (D) Harvard Cooperative Society (The Coop), and (E) English-language-only (monolingual). This illustrates (A) a principle that you should learn and, (B) a learning technique that you can use:
(A) Alternative, equivalent terms exist for most things. Different languages use different words for the same thing, for example. “Synonym” is the name for different words for the same thing in the same language. In Lesson Three you will see 16 different names for your teacher, for example. Likewise, you have several different names for yourself. You only need to use one name when you speak or write; but other people may use other names for the same thing, so the more synonms you know, the better you can understand what you hear and read.
(B) As a teaching technique, your teacher will use words in parentheses ( ) to show an equivalent term or terms. He will also use a diagonal line / (diagonal, slash) between a series of words or phrases to show that they are equivalent. He may also use the equal sign = between words to indicate equivalence.
Good luck in learning vocabulary this way. Make your own lists of equivalent terms, but your teacher will give you others.
