Full Year

CASA I: Full-Year Program

The CASA full-year program of study in both Cairo and Damascus includes three components: 1) the summer program, 2) the fall semester, and 3) the spring semester.  

1. The Summer program

The summer component of the Full-Year program is the same as the CASA Summer Program in both Cairo and Damascus.  For a complete description of the summer program at both CASA locations, please refer to the CASA Summer Program section.

The Fall Semester

The CASA fall-semester in both Cairo and Damascus offers approximately fourteen weeks of instruction and is devoted to the overall development of all language skills. Like the summer, the fall semester curriculum consists of a fixed set of courses that each fellow must take; no tutorials or elective courses are offered.  Students are expected to spend 5-6 hours every week day working on homework assignments and about 10-12 hours on the weekend. The fall curriculum provides between 16 and 18 contact hours per week distributed among the following courses:

Egyptian/Syrian Colloquial Arabic (ECA/SCA) (6 hours per week)
The aim of this course is to continue to develop the fellows' proficiency in ECA/SCA and to further expand the work begun in the summer program. Emphasis in the fall is placed on enhancing cultural proficiency, expanding vocabulary, improving grammatical accuracy, and developing the learners' ability to mix elements from ECA/SCA and MSA depending on various social contexts.  In order to accommodate varying levels of proficiency, fellows are placed in different sections based on their levels.

Reading and Vocabulary Building (6 hours per week)
This course aims to build students' reading skills and strategies and increase their ability to handle extended texts with higher levels of speed, comprehension, and accuracy. It also aims to expand both general and specialized vocabulary in order to develop proficiency in reading a variety of text genres. The course utilizes both fiction and nonfiction reading materials and requires extensive work both inside and outside the classroom. The course involves a substantial amount of writing to reinforce vocabulary control and enhance grammatical accuracy. The course is organized around certain themes chosen by the faculty and fellows (e.g., language and society, the Arabs and the West, identity, globalization, economic development, etc.). These themes also allow integration among all the fall semester courses, providing repeated exposure to the same range of vocabulary in reading, listening, writing, and speaking activities. Class activities include in-class timed readings, vocabulary building activities, extended discussions and presentations on materials read. Fellows are placed in different sections based on their levels of proficiency.

Listening and Speaking (6 hours per week)
Two main objectives underlie the fall semester listening course: 1) to further improve the fellows' ability to comprehend the various spoken registers of Arabic, and 2) to enhance their ability to make extended formal oral presentations in MSA.

The course provides a variety of listening materials from the media in both MSA and Educated Arabic that contain a mixture of ECA/SCA and MSA. In addition, this course utilizes the CASA Fall Lecture Series for further exposure to academic presentations in Arabic. This course also has multiple sections, to which students are assigned according to proficiency level.

The Fall Lecture Series
During the fall semester, CASA offers a lecture series that constitutes an integral part of the academic program in general and the Listening Comprehension course in particular. The lectures are part of the CASA program at both CASA locations in Cairo and Damascus and they deal with a variety of topics and are presented by leading Egyptian and Syrian academics and intellectuals. The lecture series is intended to supplement the themes of the reading course and to provide further listening practice.

The Cultural Program
In addition to courses and the lecture series, CASA students participate in the diverse cultural program offered by CASA in cooperation with the ALI.at AUC and the Language Center at the University of Damascus.

The Spring Semester

The spring semester represents the culmination of the CASA program. In the spring, fellows in Cairo and Damascus have the chance to tailor the program to their own academic and professional needs and to fully utilize the advanced language skills they have developed during the summer and fall, in working with Arabic materials in their own fields of specialization. The harder fellows have worked in the summer and fall semesters, the more they will be able to take advantage of and enjoy the spring semester.

Each fellow is required to take four courses, approximately 12 contact hours per week. These courses include one required course, "Writing, Stylistics and Grammar," and 3 elective courses (see below). Fellows may opt to take three language courses (such as Advanced ECA/SCA, Spoken MSA, Translation, Writing, etc.), or may wish to focus on courses related to her/his research (in Literature, Religion, Sociology, or Economics, etc.). Many fellows choose to combine both language-focused and non-language courses. The spring semester offers a great deal of flexibility, and allows fellows to set their own curriculum. In consultation with the CASA Executive Director in Cairo and Damascus, fellows choose from the list of courses that have been offered over the past few years or may even design a course of their own and seek a faculty member for the course. (Note: Financial restrictions prevent CASA from offering individual tutorials. Any course offered in the spring must have a minimum enrollment of five fellows.)

The faculty who teach in the spring semester are drawn from the Arabic Language Institute at AUC and the Language Center at the University of Damascus, as well as from Egyptian and Syrian universities and research institutes. The faculty are leading specialists in the academic fields they teach and they conduct the CASA spring courses as they do the advanced courses they offer at Syrian or Egyptian universities.

Writing, Stylistics and Grammar (3 hours per week)
The writing course aims to enhance the fellows' ability to produce extended Arabic discourse that is structurally correct and reflective of the stylistic characteristics of Arabic. Fellows in this course experiment with various writing styles with special attention paid to academic writing. They also work extensively on improving the grammatical accuracy and stylistics of their written work through the use of connectors, synonyms, parallelism, complex sentence structure, and so forth. Fellows are required to produce a paper in their field of specialization by the end of the semester. The Writing course is also offered in multiple sections.

The following are some of the spring courses that have been offered at the CASA Cairo location in the last few years:

Advanced Aural and Written Media, Advanced Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Advanced Translation, Advanced Writing, Andalusian Literature, Arabic Film Studies, Arabic Grammar, Arabic Literature, Arabic Poetry, Contemporary Arab Political Thought, Coptic Studies, Economic Development in Egypt, History of Cairo, History of Modern Egypt, Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Political Philosophy, Kuttaab (Traditional Quranic Memorization and Recitation), Media Studies, Medieval Texts, Popular Culture, Qur'an and Hadith, Scientific Texts (Medieval Science), Spoken MSA, Urban Planning of Cairo, Women's Studies, 1001 Nights.

The spring semester in Egypt also has its own cultural program that includes several trips to various parts of Egypt. Past trips have included the Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Moses and Nuweiba, Marsa Matrouh and Siwa Oasis, Oases of the Western Desert.

What Does the CASA Full-Year Fellowship Cover?

Each CASA full-year fellow will receive the following:

• roundtrip airfare to/from Cairo or Damascus
• paid tuition for all courses
• a stipend of 2200 Egyptian Pounds/20,000 Syrian Pounds per month to help meet living expenses
• program-related tours of Cairo/Damascus and subsidized trips to historical sites in Egypt and Syria

The CASA program will handle all travel reservations and issue the tickets for the fellow. CASA fellows are responsible for arranging and paying for their housing and meals. Each CASA full-year fellow is expected to pay a non-refundable program fee of $1,650 (for students affiliated with CASA Consortium Schools) or $2,200 (for students not affiliated with Consortium Schools). More details regarding program expenses