Difficulties in Learning the Arabic Language for Non-Native Speakers “Students in The Fifth and Sixth Grades of Primary School in the State of Qatar as an example "Fifth and sixth grade students in the State of Qatar as a model"

Abstract

ABSTRACT

As the researcher worked as a primary school Arabic language teacher in Qatar, and through the education experience and interraction with non-Arabic speakimg students, the researcher identified   essential challenges that needed addressing to achieve satisfactory outcomes. This involved pinpointing the difficulties faced by these students, devising solutions, and adopting an analytical descriptive comparative approach in this research. The researcher employed a survey tool to collect data, designing a questionnaire distributed among the study sample to gather research responses. The study tool comprised 99 items divided into three main axes, branching into seven sub-axes from the first axis. The study population focused on non-native Arabic-speaking fifth and sixth-grade students, with a sample of 28 students based on specific variables such as country of residence, grade, school, and student gender. One of the primary goals of this research was to overcome the barriers hindering non-Arabic speaking students from learning standard Arabic fluently, enabling them to speak and utilize it practically in their daily lives and academic pursuits. The research recommends developing a specialised and simplified curriculum by experts concerned with non-native Arabic-speaking students, parallel to the core curriculum for all students. Additionally, it suggests setting up an extra classroom specifically for fluent non-Arabic speaking students, designing a timetable that aligns with their learning capacities, training teachers for this type of education, creating newsletters and leaflets in the students' primary language translated into standard Arabic, containing educational messages regularly sent to parents to help them understand the requirements to support their children's learning, and encouraging students to visit the school library whenever possible and read stories in Arabic.

Keywords:

 Keywords: learning difficulties, Arabic language teaching curricula, non-Arabic speaking students, primary school students.