Kirk Belnap
Dr. R. Kirk Belnap is the Director of the NMELRC.
Kirk Belnap is a professor of Arabic in the Department of Asian and
Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University, where he has been
since 1988. Previous professional service includes six years as
executive director of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic
and then six years as editor of its journal, Al-\'Arabiyya.
His research interests include language policy and planning, second
language acquisition, and the history of Arabic. He is now putting the
finishing touches on NMELRC’s study of Middle East language learning in
U.S. higher education. With co-P.I. Robert Blake (U.C.-Davis), he is
overseeing completion of Arabic Without Walls, a hybrid
asynchronous distance-learning introductory Arabic course funded by
FIPSE. Last, and best of all, he is married to Linnea Pearson and they
are the parents of four children (who have formally studied seven
languages). His oldest daughter (and only child who has yet to enroll
in Arabic) is currently learning Latvian intensively.
Dr. Belnap holds his B.A. in Linguistics from Brigham Young University,
M.A. in Language Acquisition/Arabic from Brigham Young University, and
his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Recent Publications
- Beliefs about Language Learning Held by Teachers and their Students at Two Arabic Programs Abroad (with Patricia Kuntz). Al-Arabiyya, 34:91-113, 2001.
- Arabic Personal Correspondence: A Window on Change in Progress? (with Brian Bishop). International Journal of the Sociology of Language 163:9-25, 2003.
- Educating Young Citizens after September 11th: A LCTL in a
Social Science Classroom (with Erin Olsen). To appear in Content-Based
Language Instruction in K-12 Settings, ed. by JoAnn Crandall and Dorit
Kaufman, TESOL.
- A Profile of Students of Arabic in U.S. Universities. To appear in Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals, ed. by Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in the United States:
Realities, Needs, and Future Directions (with Mahmoud Al-Batal). To
appear in Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals, ed. by Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Teaching a Less Commonly Taught Language in a Social Science
Classroom (with Erin Olsen). In Dorit Kaufman and JoAnn Crandall
(eds.), Content-Based Instruction in Primary and Secondary School Settings, 111-18. Alexandria, Virginia: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2005.
- A Profile of Students of Arabic in U.S. Universities. In Kassem M. Wahba, Zeinab A. Taha, and Liz England (eds.), Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals, 169-78. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.
- The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in the United States: Realities, Needs, and Future Directions (with Mahmoud Al-Batal). In Kassem M. Wahba, Zeinab A. Taha, and Liz England (eds.), Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals, 389-399. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.