Utilising Fiction to Promote English Language Acquisition

Suhair Al Alami

Jul 2013 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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The teaching of English in the United Arab Emirates is based upon the communicative approach and aims to enable EFL students to employ language skills for communication purposes, as appropriate. Personal experience and the author’s colleagues’ observations, however, reveal that a number of EFL university students fail to achieve adequate communicative competence, which, in turn, does not qualify them to exploit the foreign language of English as required by their curricula as well as by today’s world.

Central to university education in the United Arab Emirates is critical thinking. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that EFL university students are well-equipped to tackle a reading text and to handle a writing task, demonstrating through such activities an adequate repertoire of critical thinking skills. Personal experience and the author’s colleagues’ observations, however, indicate that this does not apply to a number of EFL university students studying in the country.

Seeking an effective remedy, the author argues that utilising literature in the EFL classroom would be beneficial in terms of many essential aspects. Based on a three-year research project conducted at a private university in Dubai involving a number of EFL students, the book concludes with some suggestions with regards to what criteria to adopt when utilising literary texts.

The current book, as such, is expected to be of use and interest to: applied linguists (as the study proposes an approach to integrating the teaching of language, literature, communication and critical thinking, with the ultimate goal of promoting communicative competence and enhancing critical thinking on the part of EFL learners); curricula designers (since the study introduces a course for the enhancement of communicative competence and critical thinking); and EFL instructors (because the study offers instructional material which can be adopted or adapted when teaching EFL university students).

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Suhair Al Alami holds a PhD in Linguistics from Ain Shams University, Egypt, and another PhD in Applied Linguistics from Aston University, UK. Currently, the author works at Al Ghurair University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dr. Al Alami has received awards for both her teaching and research from Al Ghurair University and has presented papers at a large number of international, regional and local conferences and symposia, including various TESOL Arabia conferences. She has also contributed a wide range of papers and chapters to various journals and serves as a member of the board of reviewers at the prestigious Arab World English Journal.