Issues in Arabic Applied Linguistics

Abstract

This paper brings to light the status and situation of Arabic linguistics in Moroccan universities. While English language teaching and learning has enjoyed a lot of attention from different parties, including researchers and stakeholders, many other languages continue to be overlooked despite their use in education by a large population of native and non-native speakers. Among such languages is Arabic, which is claimed to be spoken natively by around 360 million people. It is not the case that the language has not benefited from any effort whatsoever with pedagogical objectives, but simply that it has not benefited from the recent advances in research methodology and techniques that languages like English have been submitted to for decades. Consequently, many aspects about its learning and teaching remain unexplored, at least not to a satisfactory extent. The objective behind his paper is to report the findings of a few studies that I conducted, individually or in collaboration with other colleagues or students, on some issues related to the learning of the Arabic language by native speakers in Morocco. The paper will be articulated as follows: Section 2 provides a brief description of the context in which the language is taught, raising some questions relative to its status. Section 3 focuses on the role of Arabic vocabulary and discuss the challenges that researchers face when attempting to understand its functioning and measurement. Section 4 is devoted to the measurement of learners’ vocabulary breadth. Section 5 reports some findings on depth of vocabulary knowledge, before concluding with a summary of the main points discussed in the paper.