Teaching English to Arabic Speakers

By Greg Day

As mentioned in Jaya’s Bitesize Research this week, here at WA we teach a large proportion of students who would be classified as EAL. Of those students many speak Arabic. As someone who does not speak a second language myself, I wanted to have an understanding of the barriers that Arabic speakers face when learning English using research from the British Council.

Objectives: To understand the barriers faced by Arabic speakers when learning English and how to overcome them. 

Summary:

The key overall themes are: 

• English language is extremely important in Arabic speaking countries. The majority of the population would begin to learn English during their time at Primary school. Many students in Arabic countries also learn English outside of school through additional English lessons. Arabic nations are very diverse and so being able to use English as a common and business language is vital

• Learning English can present many challenges to Arabic speakers. For starters there is a completely different writing system as well as use of grammar. There are different rules for punctuation and so, as an example, many Arabic speakers will use a comma instead of a full stop.

• One of the main differences is that Arabic is written from right to left as opposed to left to right in English. Because of this, English will appear backwards making school textbooks seem very confusing. 

• Some English sounds are very difficult to pronounce. For example in Egypt, Arabic speakers pronounce ‘p’ and ‘b’ and ‘th’ as ‘s’ or ‘z’. These pronunciation errors do not tend to cause communication problems but can lead to some misunderstanding.

   

Tips to overcome these barriers:

• Let the student listen first. It takes time for someone who is new to English to acclimatise to the sounds. When the student is able to hear how words are pronounced correctly they will then feel more confident speaking themselves. 

• Lots of ‘drill and repeat’. Learning English for the first time requires lots of repetition and drilling, especially as the learner gets to grips with the new sounds. This is especially important when learning keywords.

• Establish classroom language early on. It can be very daunting learning a new language so keeping classroom instructions basic and using the same instructions each time will help the student understand these instructions much quicker.

Most important tip - don’t forget that the student is fluent in their own language(s)!

It’s all too easy when listening to somebody speaking broken English to forget that behind the errors and the mispronunciation is a person with cogent thoughts. They are articulate in their first language however may be struggling to communicate his or her opinions or ideas in English. This can be very frustrating for the student. Use positive praise and encourage the student to use English as much as they can and reminding them that making mistakes does not matter!