Rate My Professor Martin Isleem

Martin Isleem serves as Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Director of the Arabic Studies Program at Bucknell University within the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics. He joined Bucknell in the fall of 2009 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and advanced to his current position, where he teaches Arabic language and culture courses. Isleem earned his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 2011, defending a dissertation on language attitudes and change among the Druze in Israel. His academic career at Bucknell has focused on advancing Arabic studies through teaching and research in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy.

Isleem's research centers on Arabic sociolinguistics, particularly the linguistic practices and identities of minority communities in Israel, such as the Druze and Circassians, as well as effective methods for teaching Arabic as a foreign language in U.S. universities. He is the author of the book Arabic as One Language: Integrating Dialect in the Arabic Language Curriculum (Georgetown University Press, 2017), which explores the integration of colloquial dialects into formal Arabic instruction and has received 123 citations. Other significant publications include "Druze Linguistic Landscape in Israel: Indexicality of New Ethnolinguistic Identity Boundaries" (International Journal of Multilingualism, 2015; 36 citations), "Arabic-Hebrew Codeswitching: The Case of the Druze Community in Israel" (International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2016; 17 citations), "Farming the Front Line: Gaza’s Activist Farmers in the No Go Zones" co-authored with Ron J. Smith (City, 2017; 20 citations), "Language Maintenance and Multilingual Education: The Case of the Circassian Language in Israel" (2019), "Integrating L1 in L2 Classrooms: The Case of Arabic as a Foreign Language in US Universities" (2021; 2 citations), "Linguistic Landscape in the School Setting: The Case of the Druze in Israel" (2016), and contributions to Comparative Studies in Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). His scholarship, cited over 226 times according to Google Scholar, addresses sociolinguistic status of Arabic in Israel, code-switching patterns, classroom integration of colloquial Arabic, and multilingual education policies, contributing to both theoretical understanding and practical pedagogical innovations in Arabic language education.