Control of Learning Beliefs among Arabic Language Course Students.

The Arabic course at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Malaysia is an elective course offered to first degree students. The objective of this study was to investigate students' control of learning beliefs in learning oral Arabic at UiTM. It was a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative study using a questionnaire adapted from The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and interviews. For quantitative data, the disproportionate stratified random sampling technique was used involving 445 samples while for qualitative data, 13 interviews with students and eight interviews with subject lecturers were engaged. The selection of students took into consideration their prior experience in learning Arabic and the faculty clusters they belonged to. The study found that the control of learning beliefs among students was high. It was also found that there was no significant difference in this component among students with different prior experience. This study suggested that activities and learning practices which stimulate students' autonomy in learning oral Arabic have to be used constantly in order to nurture the control of learning beliefs among students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]