Challenges of Writing in Arabic as a Foreign Language Context: Case of the Spanish School in Rabat

Abstract

“Learning to write coherently... is something which many people never manage in their first language [and] the process is every bit as difficult in a second language” (Nunan, 1991, p.99). As such, interest in writing amongst applied linguists has increased quite importantly during the last two or three decades; soon, the discipline has rapidly and “clearly come of age thanks to the launch of several firsts in L2 writing” (Leki, Cumming & Silva, 2008, p.1). It is within this context and with the objective to uncover what challenges learners of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) face while learning Arabic writing that this qualitative corpus study was conducted. Three prevalent challenges emerged: one was the students’ difficulty to spell Arabic words correctly; another emanated from their overall inability to learn the common Arabic order of syntactic constituents; and the other had to do with the challenge to write well-organized Arabic paragraphs.