Cultural Barriers to Learning English Faced by Native Arab Speakers - Term Paper Example

English is considered as a tool to keep abreast of technological advancements the hold the key to modernization. This importance given to higher education in the west can be sensed in the increasing number of Arab students seeking admission in western universities. Despite the “intense and continuous contact of Arabs and westerners in the educational, political, and economic arenas, there is still a great deal they could learn about the symbolic meaning of each other's actions” (Meleis 1982, p. 439) and lack of the knowledge of English becomes a major stumbling block in the communication processes.

This work shall scrutinize the previous research to understand, in the first place, the cultural barriers that impede native Arabs from adapting to their new academic environments in general, and then focus on those barriers that impede learning English, both orally and in the written form. The first section will analyze the various cultural differences that act as barriers to their adaptation to western academic cultures in general, including race and commonality; and then, the second section will analyze the barriers to learning the spoken language in terms of pronunciation differences and finally, the barriers to writing English properly, especially academic writing will be studied, and conclude with suggestions for future.

Section I Cultural Differences as Barriers in General Academic Adaptation Here, we shall first consider some of the barriers that Arab students face in general in the west that impedes their general learning itself and then go on to the specifics of studying the barriers to learning English. An overview of the research literature available on the different types of problems faced by native Arab speakers in learning English indicates that completely opposite sets of cultural values become the most basic barriers to learning English.

The research works of Gallagher (1989), Rich & Troudi (2006), Al-Zubaidi (2012), Meleis (1982), and Sherry, Thomas, and Chui (2010) provide good glimpses into such barriers that pertain to social and cultural differences.