Plurilingualism in the Middle Eastern Context: A Higher Education Guide

Higher education across the Arab world sits at the intersection of several powerful, often competing linguistic forces: a living diglossia between Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects; the rapid expansion of English-medium instruction across the Gulf; the enduring presence of French in the Levant and Maghreb; and, across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, mass displacement that has placed refugee and host-community students side by side in the same lecture halls. This book argues that the plurilingual model - developed originally within Council of Europe language policy - offers Arab higher education institutions a more accurate and more productive framework for this complexity than either strict English- or Arabic-medium monolingualism, but only if the model is adapted rather than imported wholesale. Grounded in the sociolinguistics of Arabic diglossia (Ferguson, 1959; Ibrahim, 1983), the empirical literature on English-medium instruction in the Gulf (Belhiah & Elhami, 2015; Findlow, 2006; Carroll, Al Kahwaji, & Litz, 2017), and the broader Council of Europe plurilingual tradition, this book offers higher education practitioners across the region - programme leaders, academic developers, language centre staff, and subject lecturers - a practical model for curriculum design, assessment, staff development, and institutional policy suited specifically to Arab higher education contexts, from Gulf branch campuses to Levantine universities absorbing displaced student populations. Sixteen chapters move from theoretical foundations through pedagogical practice to institutional policy and critical debate, including a chapter that confronts directly the question practitioners in the region most often ask: is a European-derived framework the right tool for an Arab higher education system at all, and if so, on what terms?