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Date of Award
Winter 2018
Rights
Access perpetually restricted to EWU users with an active EWU NetID
Document Type
Thesis: EWU Only
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA) in English: Teaching English as a Second Language
Department
English
Abstract
This project is the bi-literacy narrative and autoethnography of a novice English teacher who earned the undergraduate degree in English Language at King Abdulazziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The author offers a brief literacy narrative of her experience learning Arabic in girls’ schools on a military base in Tabuk in northern Saudi Arabia and at the university. Through strategic contemplation, she reflects on her mother’s illiteracy, which was common for women of her mother’s generation, while focusing on her mother’s strengths, especially her commitment to educating her six children—all of whom have earned college degrees. In the autoethnography, she traces her growth as a teacher and her interest in applying Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to the education of women in Saudi Arabia, focusing on creating materials that reinforce Islamic values. She offers 11 written artifacts created during her graduate studies as well as three sample lessons she designed in her curriculum seminar and on lesson co-created by her and her thesis chair and internship supervisor. Rather than including just the four traditional macro-skills—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—she adds viewing and visually representing (Tompkins, 2016). In so doing, she refined and expanded basic CLT—sometimes described as a “fuzzy” method by applying the NCTE whole language educational philosophy to her original curriculum based on biographies of women.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Alamri, Eiman, "Educating Saudi Women through Communicative Language Teaching: A Bi-literacy Narrative and An Autoethnography of a Saudi English Teacher" (2018). EWU Masters Thesis Collection. 468.
https://dc.ewu.edu/theses/468
