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.
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