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Affiliation(s)

University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

ABSTRACT

Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has been growing throughout the Arab world and hence English has become an obligatory subject in the school curriculum in most Arab countries. However, teaching EFL to Arab learners outside the L1 environment becomes more challenging. In such a setting, Arab EFL learners use mostly spoken English for survival, i.e., English acts as a genuine lingua franca outside the classroom and this requires well-qualified teachers as well as a professional educational environment inside the classroom. For survival, the speaking skill becomes inevitable. The study attempts to investigate the factors that might affect Arab high school learners’ EFL speaking performance in Poland. The data collected come from two sources: a questionnaire that was distributed to Arab EFL high school learners (N = 30) studying at the Libyan private school and Dar al salaam private school of Iraq in Warsaw and semi-structured interviews with instructors (N = 3). Both quantitative and qualitative approaches have been employed. The findings reveal that students encounter problems in EFL speaking skill due to three main factors: teacher-related variables, curricular-variables, and learner-variables. 

KEYWORDS

speaking skill, environment, teacher-related variables, curricular-variables, learner-variables

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