Halima Belemlih, Ph.D.

Education

Ph.D.: Linguistics (Pragmatics & Cross-Cultural Communication), University Mohammed Premier, Oujda, Morocco, in coordination with, University of Salford, Manchester, England (2002)

Master of Arts: ESL/EFL and Linguistics (Stylistics), University Mohammed Premier, Oujda, Morocco (1990)

Certificate of Postgraduate Studies: Applied Linguistics, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fes, Morocco (1987)

Bachelor of Arts: EFOL and General Linguistics, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fes, Morocco (1985)

About Halima

As a native trilingual speaker of Arabic, Berber and French and a relatively fluent learner of English Dr. BELEMLIH thought she was well equipped to explore the trip she won, as a B.A. student to the US, to celebrate the Moroccan American Bicentennial relationships in 1987. She discovered she was wrong when she starved for two days in her host’s family in Minnesota, because they were taking her ‘No’s for their offers of food literally, when she was expecting them to keep insisting on her to eat until she surrenders. Since then, she knew there was more to a language than just fluency and that the slightest error in the pragmatics of a language can be far more damaging that the most flagrant mistake in grammar. This is the question she tries to explore both in her research in linguistics and in her teaching of languages, making sure that even students who take but one semester of language with her can get out well equipped to behave correctly in the target culture.

Since she obtained her Ph.D. in 2002, Dr. BELEMLIH has worked in the fields of research and teaching in: Linguistics, Languages, Translation and Cross Cultural Education, in Africa, Europe and the US. She also provided cultural and curriculum advising, translating and consulting services to various institutions inside and outside the US.

Dr. BELEMLIH is also a winner of a various scholarships and grants. In 2014, she won, and directed, a Fulbright Hays grant for the University of New Haven: "Global Classrooms and Cultural Connections for the 21st Century Learners: Morocco’s Bountiful Perspectives", in which she took 12 K-12 educators to Morocco to study Arabic and immerse in the culture in order to develop curricula about the Arabic culture and civilization and incorporate them in US learning materials.