From Recognition to Production: Diagnosing Arabic Language Skill Imbalances among Non-Native Learners at the Islamic University of Maldives through a Task-Based Framework

This paper presents a theoretically grounded pedagogical proposal informed by a directional diagnostic pattern among non-native undergraduate learners at the Islamic University of Maldives (IUM). The underlying project involved a quantitative phase with 120 learners selected through convenience sampling and a qualitative phase with 30 purposively selected participants. It used pre- and post-tests across listening, speaking, reading, and writing, together with classroom observations, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews; the questionnaire was reported to have acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .87). The available records indicate an uneven four-skill profile: reading appears comparatively stronger, while listening and speaking emerge as the most pronounced areas of difficulty; writing is also constrained by weak independent sentence construction, vocabulary retrieval, grammatical accuracy, cohesion, and organization. Because complete numerical and qualitative outputs are not available in the current records, the paper treats this pattern as directional rather than as a complete statistical account. Drawing on recent research from 2018–2026, it proposes a six-stage TBLT cycle integrating activation, input, language focus, collaborative task performance, individual output, feedback, and re-performance. The framework prioritizes listening, oral interaction, structured sentence production, guided-to-independent writing, pronunciation, and vocabulary activation while using reading as scaffolding rather than as the dominant instructional endpoint. The paper contributes a context-responsive pedagogical model and identifies the empirical evidence required for rigorous future evaluation.

Arabic as a foreign language; Islamic University of Maldives; listening; speaking; writing; sentence construction; Task-Based Language Teaching; communicative competence

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