Teaching Arabic as a second foreign language : coming to grips with reality

Abstract EN

This article is concerned with one major stumbling block that researchers and practitioners have grappled with for so long in the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign or second language, namely, the question of what Arabic variety to teach in a language classroom.

This article provides a general account of the sociolinguistic situation of Arabic and looks into its implication for this major question in an attempt to find a principled solution that is motivated by the linguistic realities of the language.

Different approaches to teaching Arabic that are traditionally used or recently proposed are discussed and then their shortcomings are shown.

The article shows that negligence by previous proposals of the sociolinguistic situation of Arabic has led to an impasse which hindered real progress in the field of Arabic language teaching.

It is argued, in this paper, that the best approach to Arabic teaching is one that takes as its point of departure the actual use of the language, one that mirrors, not models, the linguistic reality of the language.

An approach that also takes into consideration knowledge of more recent developments in the fields of second language learning and teaching.

Therefore, the article calls for an Arabic language course that accommodates both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the vernaculars or dialects simultaneously in the classroom.