Abstract:

As English spreads and becomes a dominant language of power in global commerce, science, and technology, the need to teach and learn through it has also grown. The aim of most of the educational curriculum around the world, including the Arabic governments, has been to develop a suitable curriculum to teach and learn English inside their countries. Libya is one of the Arab countries where the government has invested heavily in the English language teaching curriculum, which is geared towards improving the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in schools and universities. The aim of this emphasis on the teaching and learning of English is to enable Libya to catch up with the development of its economy and to promote international exchange. However, despite the government’s efforts towards improving English language learning, there have been claims from various quarters in the education field that students at all education levels are not performing successfully in SLA (Second Language Acquisition) in the four language skills of listening, speaking, writing, and reading. One of the reasons for the slow progress in acquiring the skills in SL could be the neglect of the FL (First Language) in the English classrooms. Over the past decades, increasing interest for the use of mother-tongue has triggered a variety of investigation and theoretical discussion which try to extract the full potential of FL while learning SL. Switch-coding and bilingual teaching can be a help and not a hindrance while learning a foreign language like English. Based on this assumption, the researcher of this paper has done an investigation on the advantages and disadvantages of using the Arabic language in the EFL (English as Foreign Language) classrooms in the University of Sirte in Libya. Using a qualitative design, this study collected the data through classroom observation and a questionnaire administered to the teachers. It enabled the researcher to explore Sirte University students’ English language competence in spoken and written communication. It also helped to critique the concept of “appropriateness’’ (Fairclough 1995) of particular teaching methods in Arabic social context with a view to suggest appropriate ways of improving the teaching and learning of the English language in the Libyan social context.

Keywords:

First Language, Second Language, English as a Foreign Language, Switch-coding, Potential, Qualitative design.