University Students' Level Performance in Non-departmental Arabic Language: Reasons & Solutions

Abstract

Diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of students' performance in general Arabic for non-specialized departments in general, and in the Dept. of English Language and Literature of the Faculty of Arts of the Mustansiriyah University in particular, has become urgent to enhance the strengths and overcome the weaknesses. thanks to its intellectual role and social, political, and religious message. Non-departmental general Arabic is set an obligatory course in all non-Arabic Language departments' curricula. Moreover, it is the language whereby students of most of the fields of knowledge are taught; most significantly, it is the language in which the Holy Qur'an was revealed.

For these and other reasons, Arabic has received considerable attention from specialists who, for their part, suffer from their students' underperformance realized on the cognitive, speaking, spelling, morphological, syntactic, critical, and literary levels. As today's students are tomorrow's teachers, my humble research is set as an attempt to identify the most important weaknesses and causes of students' poor performance in order to propose remedies.

At its outset, the research addresses the concept of Arabic language, highlighting its significance and effective role in establishing the teaching process. It then tackles the main challenges and difficulties faced by Arabic language and its teaching in non-specialized departments. It then identifies the causes of students' low-level performance, ending with the remedies set in terms of some conclusions and recommendations.