Higher Education Students’ Engagement and Factors That Constrain Students’ Activeness in Learning Arabic Language

Abstract

Engagement is one of the keys to improve language acquisition. This study is conducted to measure the level of students’ engagement in the Arabic language. This study focuses on engagement which refers to the activity of students in engaging with the Arabic language inside and outside classroom in the context of activities and social. This study also aims to identify the factors that influence students’ activity in engaging with the Arabic language. A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods through questionnaires and interviews is employed in this research. For quantitative data, questionnaires were distributed to 30 final year students majoring in Islamic studies at a public university while to obtain qualitative data, a total of five graduates of the Bachelor's Degree in Arabic were selected for the interview. IBM SPSS software version 27.0 was used to analyze the questionnaires and Atlas.ti software version 9.1.3 was used to analyze the interview transcripts. The findings of the study showed that the level of engagement of students towards the Arabic language is at a low level for the productive aspect compared to the receptive. The results of the interviews also showed that the majority of respondents admitted that it is difficult to engage in Arabic in productive aspects especially speaking skills. The two main factors that constrain students' engagement in Arabic are internal factors as well as environmental factors. This study proves that there is a critical need for certain parties to overcome the problems faced by students in their engagement in Arabic language.