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This study addresses the role of code switching to students' L1 (Arabic) in their ESL classrooms and whether it expands interaction in these classrooms. The gap perceived in this area needs to be addressed towards the domains of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics in the ESL classrooms teaching environment. Henceforth, this study draws on data collected from basic, secondary and college ESL classrooms in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia. The study incorporates various data gathering procedures: audio-taped spoken data of some ESL classrooms, questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The data has been analysed by descriptive statistics. The findings generally indicate that CS has been used extensively, purposefully and functionally as part and parcel of ESL classrooms' discourse. The overall findings suggest that, although the use of L1 has been criticized in the existing literature, yet it has been admitted by ESL teachers, showing that L1 use is unavoidable at basic, secondary and tertiary level in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia. In classrooms where both students and teachers share the same L1, there is a great tendency for using it in the fields of explaining meaning and difficult words, guiding interpretation, transmitting lesson content, illustrating grammatical rules, organizing ESL classrooms and praising and encouraging students. Thus, L1 has been found useful in expanding the interactions of ESL classrooms towards facilitating ESL learning process. The study also calls for sensitizing both teachers and students about the helpful uses of CS. Therefore, syllabi and methods of teaching ESL should incorporate CS in an occasional and judicious way.

This paper presents an initial sociolinguistic analysis of the varieties of Saudi Arabic spoken in the Aljouf region. The main objective of the paper is to uncover some of the sociolinguistic aspects characterizing the Jouf dialect as distinct from other Arabic variants in Saudi Arabic. Word lists and interviews were used for collecting data in Aljouf and four other areas, namely Ha’il, Alhijaz, Jazan, and Alkhubar. Four other dialects were included to provide a comparative dimension for the analysis, which was expected to consolidate the findings. Students enrolled in the sociolinguistics course at Jouf University participated actively in the process of data collection. The main criteria for selecting students were an affiliation with Aljouf and the named comparable regions. Results suggest that there are clear dialectal differences between the Aljouf dialect and the four other dialects. Variations in lexical choice were found to be relatively large between regions. Specifically, the differences between the Aljouf dialect and the Jazan dialect are greater than those between the Aljouf dialect and the Ha’il dialect. Age and gender differences were found to be significant among speakers of the Aljouf dialect. The speech of men and women proved to be slightly different with regard to certain lexical choices. Men and women used certain words that were exclusive to each sex. Speech variants between young men and women were reported by a considerable number of subjects. Slang and swearing, on the other hand, were identified as characterizing the speech of young males, who tended to use these words less as they approached adulthood.

This paper investigates learning difficulties of the linguistic minority schoolchildren (LMS) in Darfur, Sudan, in the contexts of the current conflict and the official monolingual policy. Employing quantitative and qualitative data gathering tools, we examined how the LMS at the internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps were educationally disadvantaged due to their low proficiency in Arabic, curricula developed insensitively to their identities and cultures, and how parents and teachers perceived of teaching the children in Arabic as the sole medium of instruction. The study concluded that monolingualism in education resulted in the underachievement of the IDPs schoolchildren; the vast majority of the parents and a great number of teachers believed the children could have achieved better had the teachers used, besides Arabic, native languages in teaching; and that learning of the children could be improved if their ethnic identities and cultures were integrated in curricula. Preferences of teaching the children in Arabic among the parents were primarily attributed to the current conflict, which gave rise to the revitalisation of native languages in Darfur. The teachers’ preferences thereof, however, differed – crudely traceable between one group of monolingual supporters whose perceptions were informed by their internalised state ideology of Arabicisation and another group of multilingual proponents whose viewpoints were derived from the trendy approaches favouring multilingualism in education. The findings also suggested that the government deliberately distanced itself from taking remedial interventions to mitigate the underachievement of the children with the expectation the displacement would expedite their linguistic and cultural assimilation, which have not only rendered them the most linguistically disenfranchised children in Sudan, but created the most profound de facto government language policy of its kind as well.