Following a call for nominations, and election process in accordance with the NCOLCTL ByLaws, the NCOLCTL Secretariat is pleased to announce the election of Dr. Sadam Issa to the NCOLCTL Executive Board as a Delegate-at-Large Board Member .

Dr. Isaa will serve on the board for the 2022-2023 year. He earned his Master’s in Literature and Ph.D. in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Arabic studies in the Department of Linguistics,
Languages and Cultures at Michigan State University. His research interests range from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, to research on anxiety in the classroom, the use of technology, visual rhetoric, and political cartoons. Dr. Issa has published articles in a number of journals including: Al-‘Arabiyya, Pragmatics and Society, Arabic Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Politeness Research, Popular Music and Society, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. He is currently writing a book on Arabic political cartoons.

In his tenure at Michigan State University (MSU), Dr. Issa has participated in various committees within his department and across the College and in various language programs and centers such as College Inclusive Pedagogy, the Asian Studies Program, African Studies Center, and Global Studies Program. His experience in these committees and affiliation with these language centers has given him a wide range of skills that he hopes to utilize in serving in the NCOLCTL Executive Board Delegate Member-at-Large Position. “If given the opportunity, under NCOLCTL and its respective members, I intend to discuss how to increase national enrollment and national interest in the LCTLs. It is extremely important to provide excellent and quality teaching in the LCTL classrooms, which can be achieved by providing professional and pedagogical workshops for the teachers of LCTLs”, said Dr. Issa, when asked to outline his vision for NCOLCTL.

Along with this, he would also encourage and promote the support of creating Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks for the LCTLs. In this regard, Dr, Issa has personally created two Arabic OER textbooks that he uses with his current Arabic students at MSU and that are being adopted by some Arabic instructors in the US. He will exert energy in addressing the issue of national capacity in LCTLs, the promotion and development of LCTLs at the K-12 level, and nationwide programs for supporting heritage populations of LCTLs. Dr. Issa strongly feels that the annual NCOLTCL conference, other regional and international conferences concerned with foreign languages, and Social Media are great platforms to develop language learning frameworks regionally, nationally, and internationally to facilitate these goals and achieve great things for the LCTLs.

Dr. Issa hopes to promote research on LCTLs by securing research funds and allocating these funds to support individual research papers on LCTLs. “Offering prizes for excellent research on LCTLs among foreign language organizations’ members and NCOLTCL members would enhance the quality of the research conducted on LCTLs field”, he said.