Amal Khaleefa

 

PhD Candidate

University of Paris III – France / Ifpo – Amman, Jordan

 

 

Biography

Amal Khaleefa is a PhD student at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University – Paris III, Department of Didactics of Languages, Texts and Cultures, and associated with the French Institute of the Near-East (Ifpo) in Amman, Jordan. She holds a university diploma in teaching Arabic for non-native speakers from the University of Jordan and a degree of French for non-native speakers from the University of Lyon II. She had a long experience of teaching French and Spoken Arabic for non-native speakers in Jordan. She was then employed as administrative assistant at Ifpo where she was also responsible for the Arabic language program in summer 2014. Amal earned a Master of Didactics of French Foreign Language and World’s Languages from the University of Paris III. Her current PhD research focuses on education and language teaching policies set by host countries in refugee camps.

Research Project

Her doctoral research seeks to examine the impact of multilingual and multicultural acquisition/teaching in emergency and political turmoil. The study addresses the change of language perception due to forced dislocation in Syrian refugees living in Zaatari Camp in Jordan. This research has been conducted through several ethnographic field interviews with different Syrian refugees aged between 18 and 35 years, High School directors, fieldwork workers, humanitarian actors and education specialists. It brings out, in an interdisciplinary approach, the complex links between the macro-context: the educational policies imposed by the host country in relation to the educational and linguistic realities of refugee children; the meso-context: the role that associative and non-formal education plays in the camp; and the micro-context: the impact that the teaching of multilingual and multicultural competences could have in the camp.