One Day with Kifah Hanna, Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies

by Mary Howard • Photos by Nick Lacy

A member of Trinity’s faculty since 2009, Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies Kifah Hanna,Trinity’s fi rst tenure-track professor of Arabic language, literature, and culture, has helped expand the College’s Arabic program. “While other schools have been cutting their programs, Trinity has been very supportive,” she says. Her signature teaching method — classes conducted almost entirely in Arabic, lots of conversation, and rapid-fi re vocabulary recitations and verb conjugations — is popular and effective with students. On Tuesday, March 13, The Reporter spent the day with Hanna.

8:30 a.m. Hanna arrives at her office in Seabury Hall to prepare for her first class of the day.

She says she’s always had a passion for literature and language. As a child growing up in Syria, Hanna wrote poetry, which her parents once sent to a local journal for publication. But it wasn’t until her graduate studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that her passion took shape in the academic world. “I started teaching Arabic lessons privately,” she says. During that time, Hanna developed teaching techniques that address the challenges non-native speakers encounter with Arabic. “Many of the sounds, most of the grammar, and the cultural landscape are completely new to most students,” she says. “For instance, there are five sounds in Arabic that don’t exist in any Romance language.”

10:50 a.m. Students in Hanna’s first class of the day — Advanced Arabic II Composition and Style — are greeted by their professor with ahlan, “hello” in Arabic. “This signals leaving English at the doorstep and committing to Arabic fully in the classroom,” says Stephanie Clemente ’14, an international studies and anthropology major. “I belong to a new school of teaching language,” says Hanna. The communicative approach to the teaching of foreign language limits the teacher’s talk-time and encourages students to speak and share in class, she says. “She constantly speaks Arabic to us, even if we have to answer in English,” says Christine Ganley ’12, an international studies major with a Middle East concentration. Hanna asks her students to quickly recite vocabulary words and conjugate verbs, giving them little time to think. Clemente says this fast-paced instruction helped her master the difficult task of conjugating verbs. “It emulates the way people have a conversation, by quickly thinking and translating in their heads.”

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