Problems confronting Arab students during the course of
learning English language exist in a large number. First of
all, Saudi students are not exposed to listening / speaking
activities in their daily life interaction not at home, nor at
school / college / university, nor in market or public
places. Such conditions dampen the spirit and stunt the
growth of the pupils. By virtue of their personal efforts
some students achieve a considerably good level of
fluency in spoken English. But they miserably lag behind
in other active skill that is writing. The study conducted by
Abdul Haq (1982) concludes that most Arab students
usually fumble in their writing skill. One may also quote
another study conducted by Zughoul and Taminian
(1984) to corroborate the findings of Haq. This study
reveals that most Jordanian students enrolled in EFL
classes have poor oral communication skill, as they
usually commit gross lexical errors. In his study, Abdul
Haq (1982) further reveals that most English instructors
and University officials complains about the continuous
deterioration of the mastery in English language among
the students.
Besides oral-aural problems they also face problems
because of the act of comparing and contrasting the
foreign language items with those of their mother-tongue.
As no two languages have one to one correspondence it
leads to commission of errors. The pattern of an Arabic
sentence widely differs from that of English. For example,
in most cases Arabic language does not take is, am and
are forms of verb “Be”. So when a student translates ana
waladun, he lapses into direct translation that reads “I
boy”. No doubt, translation may serve the purpose of
learning a second/foreign language but requires a lot of
time and long sustained practice. Moreover, every phrase
of the mother tongue can’t be translated. Noticeably,
sometimes translation sounds incongruous.