Mimoun Akhiat

Mimoun is a PhD student from Morocco where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in English literature and culture and master’s degree in Applied Language Studies. He taught English in Morocco for six years before he decided to embark on a brave new learning and teaching journey in the U.S. 

Mimoun is a proud and grateful Fulbrighter. He jokes that he has always thought that he was only allowed to speak Arabic and not teach it – until Fulbright changed that. After one year of teaching Arabic L2 at Texas A&M Corpus-Christi as a Fulbright FLTA, he received a teaching assistantship from Utah State University to do his master’s in Second Language Teaching. 

At USU, Mimoun fell more in love with teaching Arabic to American students. He had the precious opportunity to hone his teaching practices while gaining further and deeper understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the SLA field. Thanks to the great mentorship and support of his professors at USU, Mimoun forged yet another path towards his PhD at the University of Arizona. 

As a UoA Wildcat, Mimoun is now majoring in the linguistics of Middle Eastern and North African Languages and minoring in Technology and Second Language Teaching. In parallel, he teaches Arabic as a graduate instructor. Mimoun is not a great fan of the Sonoran heat, but he believes that the high-caliber training the UoA has to offer definitely defeats the 100+ temperature degrees. To prospective wildcats, do not fret! Heat or not, Tucson wins the bet! 

Being a speaker of both Amazigh and Arabic L1s, Mimoun is scholarly invested in what he calls dialect-standard conciliatory pedagogies and practices in the context of both Amazigh and Arabic. He is also interested in language policy and planning (LPP) issues, as well as AI and language teaching/learning.