Laila Familiar

Senior Lecturer of Arabic Language Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Email: lailafamiliar@nyu.edu
Education: MA The American University in Cairo; PhD Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Research Areas: Arabic Language Teachers Education, Curricular Design, Corpus Linguistics, Arabic Literacy, Language Ideology, Dialectology, Language Policy, Assessment

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 frequency dictionary specialized in the lexicon of contemporary Arabic fiction (Routledge 2020), studying the influence of dialects in the literary discourse, and developing a series of Graded Readers for learners of Arabic.

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