1st visit to the University of Algiers

Oct. 17th…First day meeting the folks of The University of Algiers at the Bouzareah campus. The Director of the English Department, Dr. Bensamene is quite nice and she gave me an Algerian date for my birthday! She and her staff have considerable years of experience teaching English at the University and many of them have done research and studies in England and/or the USA.

I also met the Fulbright Scholar too, Dr. Elizabeth Bishop. She is an amazing person. She is a historian and has worked for over 10 years in Egypt, I think mostly at the American Univ. of Cairo. She’s also taught at UT Austin and is fluent in Arabic and Russian. On top of this, she is funny and supercool. We will get to collaborate perhaps on some kind of American cultural projects that we may help out with at the American Corner here in Algiers or at possibly some kind of panel discussion in Oran. (American Corners are partnerships between the Public Affairs sections of U.S. Embassies and host institutions. They provide access to current and reliable information about the U.S. via book collections, the Internet, and through local programming to the general public.)

The Bouzareah campus is pretty big, and the English department is quite big. How big is big? I heard there are anywhere from 12-15,000 students there. There are about 30 faculty members teaching English. Other foreign languages are studied there, French, Arabic, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Years ago, when I visited Tangiers and Morocco, I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to work there somehow and be exposed to and utilize French and Arabic on a daily basis. Today, that is the situation I live in and it’s wonderful since I love languages. I am continuosly stimulated linguistically. Having studied French and having spent considerable time in Francophone lands, I do fine en francais. I’m a bit rusty for producing super high quality speech and a lethargic attitude at times creates a pronounced accent, but I expect in a short while to get that muscle in shape again. As for Arabic, well, the spoken variety here is very different. The basic classic tenets are the same, but at times different words are used. Also the Berber language and the French have influenced the Algerian Arabic that one hears. I will be taking a classical Arabic course at the FAC Centrale of the Univ. of Algiers. I’m excited about that as well.

At the Boozareah campus, we discussed the timetables for the upcoming semesters. I will be teaching 3 courses to 3 different groups for a total of 8 hours there per week. Writing for 4 hours, Oral Speaking for 2 hours, and Phonetics for 2 hours. The groups will either be 1st or 2nd year students and will number about 50-70 each, yielding approximately 200 total. I will teach Basic English to 2nd year students on other days at the Fac Central’s Translation Department for a total of 3 hours there. So I will have 11 contact hours for 4 different courses per semester. Obviously, I’ll be busy, but it should be interesting to cover such a variety of topics and situations.