Professional life

Jamal is a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder with a background in linguistics, bilingualism, second-language learning, and writing instruction. His doctoral research examined syntactic priming between Levantine Arabic and English in late bilinguals.

His work has stayed close to bilingual language processing, cross-linguistic influence, phonetics, phonology, and second-language learning. In the classroom, these questions meet the practical work of teaching writing and rhetoric to students with different linguistic backgrounds.

Jamal's teaching emphasizes course themes that make academic work meaningful while still meeting clear learning goals. He pays close attention to what engages students, how they respond to course materials, and which forms of support help them take ownership of their writing.

That collaborative approach is especially important in multilingual classrooms. Students' experiences with language become part of the learning environment rather than something that sits outside it.

Students are invited to reflect on information-literacy tools, stay in dialogue about the course, and use feedback to shape computer-assisted instruction — creating more room for their own voices and greater ownership of the work.