Territorial Borders and the Teaching of Writing in English: Lessons from Research at the University of Balamand

Abstract

The International Exchanges on the Study of Writing Series publishes booklength manuscripts that address worldwide perspectives on writing, writers, teaching with writing, and scholarly writing practices, specifically those that draw on scholarship across national and disciplinary borders to challenge parochial understandings of all of the above. The series aims to examine writing activities in 21st-century contexts, particularly how they are informed by globalization, national identity, social networking, and increased cross-cultural communication and awareness. As such, the series strives to investigate how both the local and the international inform writing research and the facilitation of writing development.The WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University Open Press, and University Press of Colorado are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editors are committed to the principle that knowl- vii § AcknowledgmentsThe editors would like to acknowledge and thank the many teachers and students from the Middle East-North Africa region whose perspectives and work are addressed in this volume.We sincerely thank Dr. Rula Diab and Dr. Michele Eodice for their reflections on the volume, as articulated in the foreword and afterword.We appreciate the guidance of the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing series editors-Terry Myers Zawacki, Magnus Gustafsson, and Joan Mullin-as well as our anonymous reviewers, for their support in bringing this work to fruition. Additionally, we are grateful to Ashleigh Petts at North Dakota State University for her help with proofreading the manuscript. And thanks to Mike Palmquist, for his promotion of research, exchange, and open-access scholarship through The WAC Clearinghouse.Finally, we are grateful to our own colleagues, friends, and families for their continued interest in and encouragement of our work.

Traversing Academic Contexts: An Egyptian Writer’s Literacy Learning Trajectory From Public School to Transnational University

“…Scholarship that focuses on the MENA has developed related approaches, noting challenges in teaching so-called Western values of free speech in countries with institutionalized censorship, religiously based curriculum, and gender inequities (Queen, 2012;Weber et al, 2015). Scholars have also focused on cultural-ideological challenges associated with program administration (Austin, 2017;Ayash, 2015), transfer (Annous et al, 2017), writing assignments (Miller & Pessoa, 2017), and textbook selection (Rudd & Telafici, 2017). Other studies have addressed English writing acquisition in the MENA from perspectives of language acquisition: for example, cognitive-behavioral monitoring (Abdel Latif, 2014), modality (Al-Sharafi, 2014), the use of passive voice (El-Nabih, 2014), language deficit (Wetzel & Reynolds, 2015), and language plurality (Hodges & Kent, 2017).…”