Dr. Zafer Lababidi is an Associate Teaching Professor of Arabic, and the Assistant Director and Advisor of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and specializes in Arabic phonetics/phonology and teaching Arabic as a foreign language.

Research Interests

Arabic phonetics/phonology

Speech perception/production

Arabic as a foreign language

Spoken word recognition

Second language acquisition

Dialectal variations in Arabic

Technology applications for language classrooms

Courses Taught

Elementary Arabic I

Elementary Arabic II

Intermediate Arabic I

Intermediate Arabic II

Advanced Arabic I

Advanced Arabic II

Introduction to Translation: Arabic to English

Cultures of the Middle East

Media Arabic and Popular Cultures of the Arab World

Selected Publications

• Lababidi, Z. (2016). The L2 Perceptual Mapping of Arabic and English Consonants By American English Learners.
• 2016. L1-English tense-lax vowel system influence on L2-Arabic short and long vowel learning. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVIII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, 2014 (Vol. 4, p. 63). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• (Accepted) The L2 Perceptual Development of Arabic Plain and Emphatic Sounds by American English Learners.
• (Accepted) Orthography effects on L2 phonetic categorization and lexical encoding.