Innovation in Language Learning

The UAE is often seen by those who live here as a class society, one which one’s country of origin, economic status, professional status, material possessions and even ethnicity play significant roles into one’s experience in society.  Due to the importation of labor, both manual and professional, social stratification has been constructed to form the often perceived social hierarchies.  This puts its multicultural teaching faculty in a unique position in which they are forced to negociate not only teaching in a new culture with multicultural colleagues but also function and operate within parameters of social stratification that may different from what they are used to, if at all.

In this way, the social stratification that began with the pearling industry has expanded and even been magnified considering the wider array of nationalities represented and the doubling of that population in less than a decade.

In summary, industries of the early 20^th century set a precedent for what would become a factor in later and modern UAE society, a segmented class society, often determined by nationality.   There may be a variety of ways this social stratification could affect how students perceive their multicultural faculty members.  This study aims to explore how.

Through semi-structured interviews from an interprettive approach, I set out to better understand the practices and perceptions of both university faculty members and Emirati university students who encounter this phenomenon in their higher education.