A Study on the Efficient Teaching Method of the Arabic Language -From the viewpoint of Arabic Sociolinguistics -

Abstract

In the Arab World, there exist two or more varieties of the same language used by speakers under different conditions. This sociolinguistic situation was termed "diglossia" by Ferguson. It means that classical Arabic is the literary standard and, in principal, the language of formal discourse, while colloquial Arabic is everyday spoken language. The differences between these two forms have both undermined the appeal of Arabic as a learnable and useful foreign language and weakened the effectiveness of Arabic language teaching. This research aims to study the efficient teaching method of the language as a foreign language from the viewpoint of Arabic sociolinguistics. According to Charles Ferguson’s definition, diglossic speech communities have a high variety that is very prestigious and a low variety with no official status which is in complementary distribution with each other, for instance the high variety might be used for literary discourse and the low variety for ordinary conversation. In this situation, the teacher and the student alike must face the fact that there is more to be learned than one language; perhaps it is not as much as two full languages, but it is certainly more than is generally attempted in a single language course. There are some approaches to teaching Arabic language, like the classical Arabic approach, and the modern standard Arabic approach, the colloquial approach, and the simultaneous approach. I suggest the simultaneous approach, in which students of Arabic are introduced to MSA and an Arabic dialect within the same program of instruction. It is considered as the adequate method to deal with Arabic diglossia in the classroom.