Modern Standard Arabic and the Teaching of Arabic as a Foreign Language. Some Cultural and Linguistic Considerations

This paper highlights the need for a critical understanding of the concept of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as it is used in textbooks and curricula of Arabic as a foreign language in Western universities. Despite the lack of a widely agreed-upon definition of Modern Standard Arabic, in the teaching practice MSA is portrayed as a unified, written and spoken variety. This contribution shows that MSA presents itself as a tool deriving from a defensive Arab stance which refuses the Western ‘orientalist’ characterization of Arabic as a fragmented language. The concept of proficiency underlying MSA-based educational materials and teaching practices appears to us to be the manifestation of a new ideology which results from an Arab-Western collaboration, i.e. a ‘neo-orientalist’ approach. We argue that by considering diglossia as a cultural artifice of Western colonialism, MSA-centered teaching practices efface the complex sociolinguistic landscape of contemporary Arabic communication. This contribution urges the adoption of educational practices based on a more realistic representation of contemporary Arabic and its complexity.