This year the Language and Food Technology Departments have joined forces to offer a 9/10 connected course entitled Language of Food, in which we have studied the language, culture and food of Italy and the Arab world. This article talks about the language side of the course.

The Language of Food connected course is taught for 4 hours a week, with half of the time devoted to language and culture and the other half to the food. 

During the first term of the semester we look at the country of Italy and in the second, the Arab world.

For each of the languages, we begin the term with a Kahoot and then a written quiz, which serve as introductions to the language, its food and its culture.

Following this, we complete a number of language and culture assignments:

• An ingredients page for a well known Italian/Arabic dish written in Italian/Arabic.
• A tourist guide for a famous Italian/Arabic city
• A biography of a famous Italian artist
• A biography of a famous or infamous figure in Arab history
• A project on either a famous Italian car or fashion brand.
• A calligraphy project to write your name in Arabic. ارتفع سامانثا
• A project on Arabic inventions

As well as these written assignments, the students study the Italian and Arabic languages using the Duolingo free online language tool. They  work at their own pace and pick up useful vocabulary and phrases, as well as test their listening and speaking skills. 

Students find the Italian quite easy, especially since it bears a lot of similarities to Spanish, which most of them have studied. However, Arabic is much more difficult and it takes a lot of time just getting to know the symbols.

Check out the courses following these links: https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/it/en/Learn-Italian

https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/it/en/Learn-Arabic

Finally, we watch videos to open windows into the Italian and Arab worlds.

In the case of Italian, we watch Incastrati (Framed), which is a Netflix crime comedy set in Sicily. The series is about two hapless TV technicians, who stumble upon a murder scene, and in which every step they take to avoid becoming suspects lands them in deeper trouble, both with the police and the Mafia.

This is both fun and educational at the same time and, as they watch the video, both Italian and English subtitles appear, giving students the opportunity to read what is being spoken and at the same time have an English translation.

For the Arabic part of the course, we watch a number of videos, beginning with the United Arab Emirates, where I lived and worked for two years from 2011 to 2013. I show the students the school I taught at in Abu Dhabi, my students and also videos of walking around the huge Dubai shopping malls. We then move on to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, the Alhambra in Granada (Spain), Palestine, Jordan and Oman. These are a real eye opener into the amazing Arabic culture, and I have to stop the videos on many occasions to answer students' questions.

We hope that this course will have opened the eyes of our students to two important world languages and cultures about which they probably knew very little.