DO COMPARATIVE AND REGIONAL STUDIES OF NATIONALISM INTERSECT?
The question behind this article evolved from two separate observations. While the expansion of comparative and cross-regional research has been actively promoted by leading scholars of the Middle East (and was later encouraged by such bodies as the Middle East Studies Association and this journal), so has the incorporation of scholarly insights from area studies been urged by leading political scientists as a prerequisite for revitalizing all of the discipline's subfields and institutionally endorsed by the American Political Science Association. Viewed as interrelated, these observations prompted the question framing this text: if the aims of many Middle East scholars and institutions are compatible with the aims of many political scientists and their association, why have they remained largely parallel, as suggested by scholars within both fields?
Palestine, Arabized Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National Formations
This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis-à-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.
Principles of Self-Regulation in EFL mediated by Dialogic Tutoring Sessions
Students’ engagement and determination require the use of self-regulated learning strategies to facilitate adequate preparation. This article reports a research study that looks into how eight instructors, who were trained to promote self-regulation, interact with 18 students of a Bachelor of Arts program in English language teaching in Bogota. The problem was the prevalence of an instructional model of reproduction of knowledge in the English language classes taken by the 18 students. The pedagogical intervention introduces dialogic tutoring. The instructors’ voices, in the role of tutors, and the students’ voices, as tutees, were collected in 40 videos, a questionnaire, and a focus group. Grounded theory allowed transposing the identification of patterns, code tagging, and code grouping into concepts. This process generated four principles that worked positively in the promotion of self-regulation in this socially and culturally diverse sample of instructors and students, namely: (1) addressing needs, interests and beliefs; (2) setting goals; (3) scaffolding learning; (4) providing quality feedback.