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Learning English in the Arabic-Speaking World [Review of the book Teaching

and Learning English in the Arabic-Speaking World, by K. Bailey & R.
Damerow]

Article in ELT Journal · July 2015

DOI: 10.1093/elt/ccv033

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 ELT Journal Advance Access published July 25, 2015
Review
Teaching and Learning English in the Arabic-Speaking
World
K. Bailey and R. Damerow (eds.)
Routledge 2014, 200 pp., £26.99
isbn 978 0 415 73564 3
Teaching and Learning English in the Arabic-Speaking
World is an edited volume consisting of an
introduction, a summary, and ten interesting chapters
portraying how English language is taught and learnt
in six countries of the Middle East: Egypt, Lebanon,
Palestine, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman. In
addition to the cultural and local context of each
chapter, a high priority is also given to the global role
of English in all fields of human endeavour in these
studies, as well as to the challenges of new technology
in the Arab world accompanied by the high demand
of English language instruction and learning. The
book aims to address a wide range of topics in ELT.
The editors concentrate on the need for research
in the Arabic-speaking countries that is particularly
focused on educational change at various levels
(administrators, teachers, and policymakers) and
some in-class action research for the students as well.
Damerow and Bailey start the book with the aim of
adopting a regional perspective on the teaching and
learning of English. They note that themes emerge
from such a diverse background of authors: academic
writing for Arabic students in higher education,
English as an international language, and the most
recent hot topic in the Middle East nowadays,
assessment.
In Chapter 2, Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi explores how
Arab EFL students use modality in their academic
writing at Sultan Qaboos University’s English
Department. The research focuses on 15 students’
academic essays and the acquisition of modality
devices in academic writing, which presents
interesting challenges for Arabic-speaking English
learners.Within a corpus analysis perspective, which
combines quantitative and qualitative approaches,
ELT Journal
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
the study reveals that there is a pattern where Arab
EFL academic writing is quite different from that
projected in contrastive rhetoric: its use of repetition
as a strategy to argue. Al-Sharafi then concludes that
his subjects overused modal verbs to express modality
when other lexical devices could have been used.
The subject of academic writing and the challenges
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for Arabic learners of English is also the focus of
Chapter 3. However, here Muhammad M. M. Abdel
Latif provides a study of English major students’ use
of monitoring in their EFL composing strategies.
He states that few studies have dealt with writer’s
monitoring strategies, and even fewer with the
monitoring strategies of emerging English writers
whose L1 is Arabic. The author examined two groups of
students with different levels of linguistic knowledge.
The data included think-aloud protocols generated by
the students while they were tackling an argumentative
writing task. The results showed that the students in
the upper-intermediate level group attended more to
monitoring their text production and used more types
of monitoring behaviours than did the students in the
lower-intermediate level group. The results show that
EFL writers’ ability to monitor their text production is
clearly related to their level of linguistic knowledge.
He then concludes that when L2 writers do not have
the adequate linguistic resources, they are unable to
allocate much effort to monitoring their text production.
Chapter 4, by Hassan El-Nabih, explores the problem
of Arabic speakers’ ‘overpassivization’ in English by
L2 learners in the Gaza Strip. He considers English
proficiency levels and relates them to L1 transfer
and the influence resulting from similarities and
differences between the target language and any
other language. He notes, however, that Arabic
involves diglossia, a sociolinguistic situation in
which two different varieties of a language coexist for
communication. The results of his task-based study
show that there are two types of overpassivization:
ungrammatical and unnatural. The data provided
empirical support for the argument that Arabic native
speakers make overpassivization errors in English.
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Therefore, Arab EFL classrooms should also explicitly
address the differences between causative, inchoative,
and passive structures, and the relationship between
linguistic constructions and communicative functions.
He then concludes that certain pedagogical decisions
regarding EFL syllabus construction and classroom
teaching in the Arab world should be thought through
carefully in order to improve learning and close the
gap in the literature for Arabic native speakers learning
English.
Chapter 5, by Melanie van den Hoven, explores the
more current and controversial topic of English as
a medium of instruction (EMI) in the Middle East.
With the influx of international students (especially
in higher education) into the UAE, where English
was considered EFL, there has been a certain move
towards English becoming more ESL-oriented
within this cosmopolitan context, and in particular
in the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. This chapter
explores the pilot data from the author’s long-term
ethnographic study on the perspectives towards EMI
elicited from female Emirati pre-service teachers at
a teacher’s college in Abu Dhabi. In her study, the
participants view Arabic as their own and a language
that belongs to the Arabian Gulf. In contrast, English
was designated as a public language for male and
female non-Arabic speakers, mainly in the public
domain. Hence, the results claim that EMI is seen
as much more utilitarian and of benefit in promoting
English as a lingua franca rather than a threat to the
local cultural identity of the Emiratis. Finally, she notes
that given the complex linguistic and extra-linguistic
dimensions of EMI in higher education, attention
to the varied local definitions can lead to a greater
conceptual clarity of what English is and when it is
used as a medium of instruction in the Gulf countries.
In Chapter 6, Fiodhna Gardiner-Hyland reports on
pre-service teachers in the UAE as well. The author
claims that fostering a reading culture among Arab
students as a pleasurable activity is not only a
challenge in the UAE, but also throughout the Arab
world. The obstacles exist mainly because of the
belief that Arabs share an oral rather than a written
culture. Hence, the author discusses the impact of
teacher education pedagogy on EFL reading teachers’
identities within the Arab world, especially in the UAE
context. She claims that there is an urgent need to
invest in teacher education programmes in the Arab
world with the focus on reading pedagogy. Her view
is that outdated curricula and methodologies and
reliance on rote learning, in addition to insufficient
numbers of qualified teachers, may present a clear
and immediate threat to the quality of education in
the region as a whole. She concludes that attending
Page 2 of 4 Review
to a Vygotskian constructivist-based, contextualized
EFL model of second language teacher education
pedagogy can increase the capacity of teacher trainers
to teach reading successfully and enact pedagogic
change in government schools.
In Chapter 7, Fatima Esseili reports on foreign
language teachers whose students are native speakers
of Arabic in the country of Lebanon where, like other
countries around the world, English is flourishing.
She notes that, although Lebanon is considered a
multilingual country, enacting a foreign language
education there is still challenging. She describes some
of these challenges and trends in curricular reform and
Lebanese foreign language teachers’ (English and
French) perceptions of their working conditions and
the challenges they face in teaching. Her findings
suggest that language policy, inappropriate textbook
choices, inadequate teacher training and preparation,
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as well as socioeconomic conditions, all contribute to
some factors that pose serious challenges for teachers
and students of English language. She concludes that
the government should start working on developing
the education system by taking a number of serious
steps, which include teacher training, textbook choices,
and policy reform.
Chapter 8, by Enas Hammad, reports on English
language reading skills in Palestine. Her study
concerns Palestinian teachers’ use of questioning
techniques in EFL reading classes in both public and
private preparatory schools in the Gaza Strip. The
author collected two kinds of data: non-participant
observations and semi-structured interviews. Her
findings revealed that the teachers at both public and
private schools used L2 question types in English
reading classes, but that the frequencies of the
question types varied remarkably in the two different
settings. She concludes that the use of different
question types also depended on the stage of the
reading lesson. Therefore, it would be ideal to conduct
further research on Palestinian teachers’ and learners’
reading skills in Palestine.
In Chapter 9, Mansoor Al-Surmi uses a corpus-based
approach to his data collection and analysis; he
investigated television programmes, word coverage,
and incidental vocabulary learning. Mansoor’s
research used the concept of word coverage—
percentage of known words in a text—and the most
frequent word families in English. His data report
that the genre which provides more word coverage at
a lower word-families’ level would be more suitable
for learners and could increase the likelihood of
incidental vocabulary learning. He concludes that Arab
learners of English can learn vocabulary incidentally by
watching any television shows nowadays.
Chapter 10, by Laila W. Rumsey, reports on language
assessment by exploring the predicative validity of a
regionally developed English proficiency exam: the
Common Educational Proficiency Assessment (CEPA).
Rumsey explores the use of this regionally developed
and produced English proficiency exam both as a
placement test at a large, vocational college, as well as
a predictor of students’ future academic performance.
She concludes that the results show there are some
implications for the improved predictive validity
of regionally or locally produced tests at other
educational institutions at large.
Chapter 11, by Kholoud A. Al-Thubaiti, reports on
the issue that has been influencing policy decision
makers around the world in recent years, which is the
age of L2 learning. Al-Thubaiti claims that there is
considerable debate in Saudi Arabia about the merits
of starting to teach English as a foreign language to
children in elementary school, as opposed to starting
in middle school. The author investigated the English
proficiency of Saudi adult college students who started
learning English in school at different ages (from 3 to
13 years old). In her findings, her data show that input
measures are stronger predictors of performance than
is the age of onset of L2 learning on all four linguistic
measures.
Chapter 12, by G. Richard Tucker, summarizes and
synthesizes the trends found in these ten studies.
Tucker groups the authors’ findings into what he
sees as three major foci. He notes that the first
theme relates to teachers of English as an additional
language and the practices they utilize in their
classrooms. Second, he observes an emergent theme
that involves Arabic L1 university students and their
academic English writing. Finally, the third theme
relates to proficiency in the English language and its
assessment.
Indeed, this volume deals with a wide range of issues,
which are interesting to researchers in the Arabic
region. It can be particularly interesting for action
research and in ELT and Arabic L1 interference. While
there is a range of interesting contexts, it could have
been more useful if there had been greater coverage of
different Gulf countries in the region and North Africa.
Furthermore, the themes of the book could have been
better grouped by the policy makers in the Middle
East, as there are more important changes in terms of
EMI in many Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) private
and public institutions, and education post-9/11,
which affect the teaching and learning of English in
the region nowadays.
Also, in this volume it has been noted that one
important factor of education in the Middle East and
Review
the Arabian Gulf countries is the use of English as
the lingual medium of education. However, post-
9/11 educational reforms have resulted in more
English being taught within the GCC states and an
increased influence of the Western curriculum in
general (for example Mahboob and Elyas 2014). The
GCC countries face the dilemma of responding to the
pressure on governments and educators to promote
the message of GCC as the cradle of Islam, and thus
enact its fundamental Islamic identity through the
promotion of Arabic language and culture, at the
same time responding to political as well as economic
pressures to increase the use of English and teach
Western culture in the GCC curricula.
Although the book has substantial information on
varied contexts in the Arabic-speaking world, some
‘big players’ are still missing from the scene, such
as Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Sudan. In addition,
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the volume has highlighted some issues on policy
reform initiatives, but lacks depth in its overview of
policy reform post-9/11, the current international
educational exportation in the GCC, and firm
theoretical foundations on the Muslim identity
and English hegemony in the Middle East which is
imperative for analysing the impact of English on
Arabs/Muslims in the region (for example Karmani
2005; Elyas and Picard 2013). The volume reminds
us as readers that there is more room for research
into the teaching and learning of English in such
fertile contexts as the Arabic-speaking world. Hence,
Teaching and Learning English in the Arabic-Speaking
World is a timely book which has shed some light on
more recent and updated issues and, furthermore,
should inspire researchers in the ELT field to focus on
the Middle East and the Gulf countries.
References
Elyas, T. and M. Picard. 2013. ‘Critiquing of higher
education policy in Saudi Arabia: towards a new
neoliberalism’. Education, Business and Society:
Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues 6/1: 31–41.
Karmani, S. 2005. ‘Petro-linguistics: the emerging
nexus between oil, English, and Islam’. Journal of
Language, Identity & Education 4/2: 87–102.
Mahboob, A. and T. Elyas. 2014. ‘English in the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia: a historical and linguistics
analysis’. World Englishes 33/1: 128–42.
The reviewer
Tariq Elyas is an Assistant Professor of Applied
Linguistics at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia. He obtained his PhD from the University of
Adelaide, Australia. He holds an MA in American
Page 3 of 4
Literature from the United States and a graduate Publication Reviewer of the Year (2010). His interests
degree in TESOL. He has presented and published are global English, teacher identity, policy reform, and
in a broad variety of international conferences and pedagogy.
journals, and is the winner of the Bundey Prize for Email: telyas@kau.edu.sa
English Verse (Australia 2008) and the Emerald doi:10.1093/elt/ccv033

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