In the Arab World, there exist two or more varieties of the same language used by
speakers under different conditions. This sociolinguistic situation was termed "diglossia" by
Ferguson. It means that classical Arabic is the literary standard and, in principal, the language
of formal discourse, while colloquial Arabic is everyday spoken language. The differences
between these two forms have both undermined the appeal of Arabic as a learnable and useful
foreign language and weakened the effectiveness of Arabic language teaching. This research
aims to study the efficient teaching method of the language as a foreign language from the
viewpoint of Arabic sociolinguistics.
According to Charles Ferguson’s definition, diglossic speech communities have a high
variety that is very prestigious and a low variety with no official status which is in
complementary distribution with each other, for instance the high variety might be used for
literary discourse and the low variety for ordinary conversation. In this situation, the teacher
and the student alike must face the fact that there is more to be learned than one language;
perhaps it is not as much as two full languages, but it is certainly more than is generally
attempted in a single language course. There are some approaches to teaching Arabic
language, like the classical Arabic approach, and the modern standard Arabic approach, the
colloquial approach, and the simultaneous approach. I suggest the simultaneous approach, in
which students of Arabic are introduced to MSA and an Arabic dialect within the same
program of instruction. It is considered as the adequate method to deal with Arabic diglossia
in the classroom.