Saudi Universities and the Preparatory year.

 

Few years ago –less than five years- King Saud University – other universities followed suit- established this preparatory year for the medical and science colleges in order to teach English and other skills with English is the medium of teaching in all subjects. This idea appealed to the university administration that they decided to establish such program in all colleges including Humanities, Social Sciences and Law and Regulations. Once I was teaching a class in the building of the College of Administration and Law I found some papers lying on the floor. I picked the papers to find that they belonged to the students of the preparatory year in that college. I found that the papers were photo copy of some English book published in 2009 in the field of Business Administration. The poor students had to translate almost every word, and sometimes translating the same word two or three times in the same page. I looked in the topic which was about trends and job satisfaction. The words which the students did not understand were like this:

Attitude, Introduction, Evaluative ,Either, Favorable and unfavorable

Values, Events, Opinion, Intention, Certain.

       I wondered how much time each student had to spend to understand a page or so, while if the same was written in Arabic. And in the same token I was working with my son who was studying laboratory technology in reading a chapter on establishing a laboratory. The information could be said in Arabic and he would have been able to understand that chapter in twenty minutes whereas it would have taken him two to three hours because the subject was written in English.

        Moreover one could ask those who created this preparatory year did they think of how many years are we going to lose or already losing when we have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students who would obtain a B.A in History or Geography or Physics in five years or more. The small country of United Arab Emirates took very huge steps regressing by denying Arabic language its rightful place. An American professor teaching at one of their universities said mockingly that we had three native students who  graduated the previous year with no knowledge of Arabic in a country which its constitution states that Arabic is the official language.