Abstract
The modern-day areas of Palestine corresponding to the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip represent some interesting and dynamic sociolinguistic realities. First, although these are areas in which colloquial Arabic has traditionally been spoken by a majority of the population, several other languages have been in use in educational domains especially Classical Arabic, Turkish, and French among Christians. However, the British Mandate period saw the establishment of English as an important language of political, economic, and cultural power within Palestine. Yet with the establishment of the State of Israel in areas that were once part of British Mandate Palestine, a new language was introduced to the area, Modern Israeli Hebrew. Still, English has endured, partly as a colonial leftover, but also increasingly as a window onto the world for Palestinians. The present chapter explores the enduring yet changing role that English has played and continues to play in the educational system of Palestine. The chapter concludes with evaluations of current English teaching and educational policy in Palestine and provides suggestions for enhancing this policy in order to promote economic development and growth while maintaining cultural authenticity.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be mentioned here that “Palestine” will be used in two senses in this chapter. Initially, it will refer to historical Palestine, which largely corresponds to the present-day territory of the State of Israel along with the Gaza strip and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Later, when discussing the more recent history of the area especially after the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel, Palestine will be taken to refer only to the Gaza strip and West Bank areas commonly known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1982.
- 2.
Given that such private schools tended to be Church-run or otherwise Christian charity-affiliated (Dajani and McLaughlin 2009, p. 44), this significant drop in percentage might reflect the considerable and ongoing emigration of Christian Palestinians from PA-controlled areas (see Weiner 2005, p. 6). Such an exodus would almost certainly result in a negative impact on the Palestinian economy, further exacerbating challenges to providing quality education across all schools in the area.
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Bianchi, R., Hussein - Abdel Razeq, A. (2017). The English Language Teaching Situation in Palestine. In: Kirkpatrick, R. (eds) English Language Education Policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Language Policy, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46778-8_10
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