Zafer Lababidi

Interim Director, Middle East Center & Middle Eastern Studies Program
Advisor, Middle Eastern Studies Program
Coordinator, Arabic Program
Supervising Faculty, Arabic Language House

Zafer Lababidi

Contact Information

Office Location
Diffenbaugh 337
Phone
850-644-1794
Program
Arabic
Linguistics
Middle East Center
Office Hours

Email for an appointment.

About

Zafer Lababidi (Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) is a professor of Arabic whose research and teaching focus on Arabic phonetics and phonology, as well as the pedagogy of Arabic as a foreign language. His scholarly work explores issues of language acquisition, with particular attention to how learners perceive and produce Arabic sounds, the challenges they face in mastering pronunciation, and the development of effective methods for teaching Arabic to non-native speakers

Arabic phonetics/phonology

Speech perception/production

Arabic as a foreign language

Spoken word recognition

Second language acquisition

Dialectal variations in Arabic

Technology applications for language classrooms

  • Lababidi, Z. (2016). The L2 Perceptual Mapping of Arabic and English Consonants By American English Learners.
  • 2016. L1-English tense-lax vowel system influence on L2-Arabic short and long vowel learning. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVIII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, 2014 (Vol. 4, p. 63). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • (Accepted) The L2 Perceptual Development of Arabic Plain and Emphatic Sounds by American English Learners.
  • (Accepted) Orthography effects on L2 phonetic categorization and lexical encoding.

Elementary Arabic I

Elementary Arabic II

Intermediate Arabic I

Intermediate Arabic II

Advanced Arabic I

Advanced Arabic II

Introduction to Translation: Arabic to English

Cultures of the Middle East

Media Arabic and Popular Cultures of the Arab World