116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Home / News / Education / Higher Ed
Iowa State student lands prestigious fellowship to improve communication with the Arab world
‘There’s a need for more Arabic speakers, so this kind of research will be useful in the world of humanitarian aid’
Vanessa Miller
Sep. 29, 2023 5:00 am, Updated: Sep. 29, 2023 2:10 pm
As an only child growing up in San Diego, Andrea Flinn developed a close group of friends — including some from Iraq, who she joined years later to provide a summer reading program in southern California for children of displaced families who hadn’t received quality English instruction.
At the time, Flinn was working her way through what would be various bachelor’s and language-instruction master’s degrees from the likes of Cornell University, San Francisco State University, and Middlebury College in Vermont — all while developing a growing interest in Arabic.
“I remember going from library to library,” Flinn, now 36, said of the summer reading initiative. “They must have hated me — the public library system. We got like 100 copies of the same book every week for our reading program.”
Years later, libraries could be thanking Flinn. As an Iowa State University doctoral student, she is pursuing a dissertation that involves building a collection of at least a million spoken and written texts to compile a list of the most frequently-used words in the Levantine dialect of Arabic.
With that list, Flinn aims to develop educational tools for learning the dialect — spoken in the Levant geographical area of the Middle East that includes Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel — in hopes of improving humanitarian aid to the region and helping immigrants settle and relocate.
“There’s Modern Standard Arabic, and there’s the language of the street,” Flinn said. “There’s a need for more Arabic speakers, so this kind of research will be useful in the world of humanitarian aid. Aid workers could benefit from having better resources to learn these dialects, which will lead to more effective communication.”
Fulbright-Hays fellow
Flinn, come June, will travel to Jordan to pursue her Arabic-education mission, having recently become the first Iowa State student in recent history — possibly ever — chosen for the prestigious “Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad” program.
“I can’t seem to find a recipient when I look through Fulbright’s records or our records here at Iowa State,” John Milstead, ISU coordinator of nationally competitive awards, told The Gazette. “Thus, I believe Andrea is our first recipient.”
The fellowship program differs from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, a larger and more expansive program open to anyone with a bachelor’s degree wanting to pursue research, attend graduate school, or teach English abroad. Although highly competitive, Iowa State, University of Iowa, and University of Northern Iowa annually announce students chosen for the Fulbright student program.
Conversely, the program for which Flinn was chosen is open only to advanced doctoral students seeking funding for dissertation research outside the United States and Western Europe.
“In addition, applicants must possess advanced foreign language skills so they can carry out their research projects,” Milstead said. “This makes for a particularly competitive applicant pool because virtually everyone has an advanced set of skills they have worked on for years to conduct their respective research projects. It’s a tough competition.”
Flinn said an Iowa State administrator on her dissertation committee emailed her about the opportunity, and she applied — holding no expectation of selection.
“I really didn't think I would get it,” she said. “Most people who get it have more publications.”
But she did get it, landing her a return ticket to Jordan.
'Teaching and learning new languages’
Flinn’s flight to Jordan will be a return, because between completing her undergraduate degree in 2009 and beginning her doctorate at Iowa State in 2019, Flinn not only jumped from coast to coast to get herself two master’s degrees — she also spent five of the last seven years in Jordan, “getting better at my Arabic.”
Much of her time in Jordan was in the capital city of Amman — taking advantage of an array of language programs, before deciding to take advantage of Iowa State’s renowned offerings in the field.
“The corpus linguistics department at Iowa State is world-known,” Flinn said. “So I was really excited to get the chance to come here.”
Although a good student in high school, Flinn said her interest in Arabic didn’t spark until she joined the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps as an undergrad at Cornell.
“I thought I should know something about the Middle East, just in case I found myself there,” said Flinn — who eventually put herself in the small Arabic nation of Jordan through a study abroad program at Middlebury.
“During my semester abroad in the Gulf, I discovered that I love teaching and learning new languages,” she said. “And so that's been my path ever since.”
'The gold standard’
The U.S. Department of Education in 2022 funded 177 fellows from 54 institutions through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program — with the average funding total amounting to $38,000 per fellow, according to the education department.
Flinn, in drafting her application, had to include a proposed budget for the research and an explanation of its relevance.
“The Fulbright-Hays DDRA program is the gold standard for someone in Andrea’s field of study. It doesn’t get any better,” Milstead said. “Andrea’s proposal is a sound research plan on an important and timely topic. She wrote an excellent proposal from start to finish.”
In line with the Fulbright-Hays program — geared toward projects about parts of the world not generally studied in American schools — Flinn’s dissertation aims to address the limiting reality that current Arabic learning tools focus largely on a literary form of the language used in print, academic, and official documents.
“Historically, there was more of an interest in Modern Standard Arabic for the use of the study of text,” she said. “But now, if you ask students in a survey what it is that they want to use their Arabic for, most people say they want to communicate with actual people. And so the dialect — the language of the street — is really necessary if you want to do anything in the Middle East with real people.”
The way in which Flinn plans to assemble a library of Levantine Arabic words while in Jordan involves interviews with a wide range of people — including authors, actors, film directors, and educators.
“From there, she’ll use a computer program to identify the most used vocabulary words,” according to Iowa State News Service.
That linguistics method has been applied to English but never the Levantine Arabic dialect, according to Flinn — intending to become the first.
Following her six-month fellowship in Jordan, completion of her dissertation, and achieving her ISU doctorate, Flinn said she hopes to use the resources she creates to “teach Arabic closer to home.”
“Back in San Diego,” she said. “And help develop a better understanding between Americans and the Arab world.”
Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.
Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com