Culturally responsive instruction for writing courses in the UAE: Leveraging speaking skills for writing development

At English Medium Instruction universities in the Arab Gulf and broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, there is a lack of research on the tensions between Western academic writing pedagogies and local epistemologies and cultural practices. This exploratory lesson that took place at an American style university in the United Arab Emirates, demonstrates an alternative approach to teaching academic writing by foregrounding speaking and presentation skills oriented toward more Culturally Responsive Instruction (CRI) operationalized here through the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP) model. By changing a persuasive essay to a business pitch project, it enabled students to draw upon their creative, collaborative, and narrative competencies which are deeply rooted in Gulf Arab communicative culture. The students effectively engaged with the assignment and ultimately achieved the learning outcomes; however, it was found that some dissonance exists between pedagogical innovations that embrace a CRI approach and Westen oriented assessment practices. Another finding was that in attempting to minimize the institutional norm of direct lecture, students struggled to fully understand the primary learning objectives in the early stages of the project. Thus, this paper calls for a more intercultural pedagogy that neither rejects nor replicates Western models but creates a shared space where Western and local ways of writing and learning meet and inform each other.