ESL

English as Second Language for Saudi Students



Abstract

English language has become international medium of communication, studies and business transactions. The increasing popularity and importance of this language has created the need of learning it, for many students whose first language is other than English. This paper presents the notion of English as a secondary language (ESL) for Saudi students and the difficulties they face in this regard. The research paper commence with an overview on the research topic, followed by a brief literature review in this regard. Moreover, the research question, the methodology of research and analysis is presented followed by a conclusion.

English as Second Language for Saudi Students

Introduction

The increasing trend of globalisation and students moving abroad to study has shed light on the concept of ESL. Moreover, many academic institutions and organisation use English as a medium of communication, in their activities and transactions, in their home town. This has popularised the importance of different linguistics related errors. Different languages have a different set of rules in term of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, prepositions etc. Each language has its own syntactic, morphological, semantic and lexical rules that are to be considered in the process of translation. The syntactic errors cause major challenges to the students during the course of learning. These errors include the grammatical mistakes, preference of active or passive voice sentence structure and the use of tenses. Arabic language has different preferences in terms of writing as compared to English language.

Research Topic

The research is conducted in the area of 'English as a secondary language'. English is the most widely used and officially accepted language of the world. Majority of the global business transactions are conducted in this language. Moreover, the increasing trend of globalisation has also increased the trend of students moving abroad for advance level education. In order to adjust to the new society and environment, it is very important to learn the local language. This has highly signified the importance of English language all over the world. Moreover, it has also shed light on the linguistic difficulties faced by the new language learners. These include morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical difficulties. In the context of Arabic students, they face numerous challenges in their course of studying the English language. In Saudi Arabia, since Saudis speak their native language at home and during their interaction with their friends, peers, and classmates, therefore, the possibility of learning this language in day to day interaction is almost non-existent. The main objective of this research is to discuss the concept of 'English as a secondary language' from the perspective of Saudi students and the difficulties that they experience, in terms of syntactic rules, in the process of learning.

Background

This section presents a brief literature review of the topic under discussion, along with the historical and cultural information and different theories presented in this field of study.

Arab students experience numerous problems during the course of learning English language. First and foremost is related to the upbringing ...