The Role of Motivation in Learning Arabic Language to Enhance Communicative Competence by Arab American Students

Abstract

Language as the main way of communication among humans holds a crucial role in understanding and expressing the world around us. Because of this fundamental importance of language in the life of humans, it has been investigated from different dimensions such as structure, sound processes, and cultural aspects. The central aspect of language examined by the current paper is a cross-language aspect of Arab Americans’ motivation and strategies are used to learn a second language, which can be referred to as communicative competence. Two participants were involved in this study. The first participant is a female student from Palestine and the second one an Iraqi male student. Both participants came to the U.S. when they were children. This is a qualitative case study, phenomenology inquiry of Arab American students' motivation to learn the Arabic language as a foreign or second language at the university level in the southeast of the United States. Three main methods of data collection have been used. First, interviewing each one of the two participants for 30-45 minutes. Second, observing the participants in the department of modern language and linguistics at Florida State University which they were taking a part in the class for which the researcher kept fieldnotes. Each observation was organized by following Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995) format. Third, the researchers took into account the syllabus of the Arabic course, as a document to analyze it. Each interview was transcribed, and then all the interviews, observations, and syllabus were analyzed and coded into themes to see any trends or relationships between Arab-American students and their motivation to learn the Arabic language. In the light of the study results, several useful recommendations concerning EFL learners, instructors, and syllabus designers were presented and several pedagogical suggestions for further research were stated.