Laila Familiar

Senior Lecturer of Arabic Language Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MA The American University in Cairo; PhD Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

lailafamiliar@nyu.edu

Research Areas: Language Teachers Education, Instructional Coaching, Curricular Design, Corpus Linguistics, Arabic Literacy, Language Policy, Assessment.

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Laila Familiar has been in the field of Second Language Education since 1999, and she has a special interest in Arabic language teacher education, curricular design, and corpus linguistics. She is project manager of Khallina, a website developed for the teaching and learning of Arab culture(s) through open source audiovisuals. She is also the editor of two literature-based textbooks, Sayyidi wa Habibi (2013) and Saaq al-Bambuu (2016) for learners of Arabic, and the translator of La Tía Safeyya y el Monasterio (2000), a novel by Egyptian author Bahaa Taher.

Recipient of the Texas Foreign Language Teaching Excellence Award (2014), Laila Familiar was Lecturer of Arabic at The University of Texas at Austin (2008-2014), Director of the Arabic Summer Institute (2012 & 2013), and Academic Director of the Critical Language Study Abroad Program in Fes-Morocco (2011). Previously, she taught Arabic at The American University in Cairo, the Center for Arabic Study Abroad program in Egypt, and Middlebury College.

Laila Familiar is a consultant for American Councils for International Education, and her current research involves working on A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Arabic Fiction (Routledge 2021), studying the influence of dialects in the literary discourse, and developing a series of Graded Readers for learners of Arabic.