Makda Weatherspoon

Overview

Makda Weatherspoon is a Senior Lecturer of Arabic in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, where she has been teaching since the Fall of 2008. She has also taught at Middlebury Language Program and worked as a Curriculum Developer of online Arabic materials at the University of Cambridge, Language Centre, UK. Prior to joining Cornell, she worked as an English instructor with immigrants and refugees who were preparing to take their American citizenship tests and naturalization interviews, among other things.

Makda’s academic interests include Second Language Acquisition, Corpus Linguistics, Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL), Curriculum Development for TAFL, the use of films for teaching language and culture, and integrating new technologies into language teaching.

She has lead various workshops and given talks at conferences on best practices for introducing the Arabic alphabet, using technology for enriching learners’ experience in the Arabic classroom, and methodologies for exploiting information from Arabic Corpora in curriculum design.

Makda is a volunteer instructor at the Auburn Correctional Facility as part of the Cornell Prison Education Program. She is also a faculty advisor to a number of on-campus student organizations

Courses Taught

• Elementary Arabic I & II
• Intermediate Arabic I & II
• Arabic Language through Film
• Advanced Arabic I
• Intensive Arabic I