Education and COVID-19: Learning Arabic Language and Perspectives

Abstract

The study discusses the online teaching and learning of Arabic in order to evaluate students’ difficulties and the way in which to approach this language in an interactive way, overcoming the barriers of computer screens. Nevertheless, e-learning is the future of education and it is crucial to offer a quality education, implementing emotional learning consciousness within the academic community. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted practically every country in the world. It created an extremely difficult global situation, and humanity found itself faced with an emergency state of working online and swiftly adapting its routine to a new reality. This was certainly the case in Spain when, in mid-March 2020, students were forced to study from home and teachers to teach at a distance. COVID-19-and its related restrictions arrived suddenly, and there was little to no time to acclimatise to the new way of studying. The objective of this study is to analyse the difficulties faced by students of Arabic as a foreign language, and to offer some recommendations to improve online teaching, applying the communicative framework, combined with the importance of introducing the psychology theories and emotional education which is key to obtaining positive results. First, the topic is introduced, then the way to teach and learn the Arabic language online is discussed. Afterwards, the methodology is defined, highlighting the relation between emotional education and the Communicative Approach. A hypothetical-deductive method is applied to this analysis. A questionnaire is responded to by students of the Arabic language in Spanish universities in order to get an insight into their difficulties when learning online. A qualitative study is carried out in order to analyse the problems faced by the students and offer some possible recommendations to improve the quality teaching of Arabic as a foreign language, based on the perceptions of the students, taking into account the social context experienced during the 2020-2021 academic year.