Arabic Children's Literature Lecture, Stories and Discussion with award-winning author Manar Hazzaa

Dear students, researchers and colleagues,

I'm delighted to invite you to this exciting talk/workshop delivered by Manar Hazzaa - an award-winning Arabic children’s book author. Manar is a PhD Researcher at LCS who has just started her research journey under the supervision of Professor Cat Davies and myself. Hazzaa received her recent Master of International Education Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education and, previously, a Master of Anthropology from the American University in Cairo.

In her talk, Manar will be sharing insights from her journey writing children's stories with a simplified language that supports young people's Arabic literacy while acknowledging the impact of diglossia. In the first part of the talk, Manar will be presenting the challenges faced by young readers and their parents. In the second part, she will demonstrate the process of language simplification that she applied in order to bridge the linguistic distance between the standard and the dialectal varieties of Arabic. This linguistic analysis would be of interest to Arabic learners, speakers and researchers.