English Curriculums in Saudi Schools

     

      English has been taught in Saudi schools since 1927. And since then English curriculums have shown a rapid positive rise in every aspect in books, the methods of teaching, and hiring technology to make learning smoother and easier.

     There are some people that have some imperfection in English, and are accusing bad English curriculums for this imperfection. It's like Saudi English curriculums are the hanger, where they hang all their weaknesses in the language.

     I find this act is actually weak! Ignoring your part of learning the language and sit there waiting for them to spoon feed you isn't called learning! And at the end of the day when they realize that they don't speak like native speakers, they blame the curriculum.

     We have to do our part of learning searching different topics, reading articles or other materials other than school book, speaking, writing, and practicing what you newly learned. It would complete the part we receive at school. So, it would be 100% shared effort, not just effort provided by the school only. The question here is how do you do your part of learning?

     Memorizing paragraphs and pasting them at the exam paper is the wrong way of convincing yourself that you are learning. And I'm sure that all of you have seen this case in school, where the girls hold their books and try to revise the paragraph that they memorized. This act wouldn't make any progress on their grammar, structure of writing, and the full understanding and control of what they are writing.

     In the other hand, some of you would argue with me that the main problem in our English curriculums is speaking. We don't use the language, that's why we don't learn it easily. To respond to them I will clarify that speaking is included in our curriculums. Starting from say this and that, to asking your opinion about something and your reason, so the problem isn't in curriculums the problem is in teaching it. And as I said before you have to stand up and demand your right or what you need, which is speaking in this case, so by doing this you would do your part of learning and get benefits from the curriculum not to hang your weaknesses in it.

# A presentaition I did in Speech class.

Dec 2010