Students’ Comprehension of Arabic and English Terminology in Islamic Finance: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The rapid growing of Islamic finance sector is characterized by the establishment of Islamic financial institutions as well as Islamic financial market worldwide. Indonesia also shows significant development in this sector, which can be observed through the founding of various Islamic banking and insurance companies. As a result, Indonesian students’ interests in taking majors in Islamic Economics and Business are skyrocketing in the last decade. However, this phenomenon is not without any challenges since those students come from different educational backgrounds, either Islamic or public high schools. Meanwhile, Islamic finance uses much terminology taken from Arabic and English languages. This means that students from public high schools may not be familiar with the terms from those two languages, particularly the Arabic-derived ones. Thus, this study aimed to investigate Islamic Economics and Business UIN SU students’ comprehension of Arabic and English Terminology used in Islamic Finance. Employing a descriptive quantitative approach, this study used questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. The results reveal interesting findings indicating students’ comprehension of Arabic terminology is significantly higher than that of English one. It can be concluded that students coming from either Islamic or public educational background have no significant differences in understanding Islamic financial terms derived from Arabic and English languages.