A Needs Analysis for the Course Materials Design of the Arabic Language Course

The Arabic course the Faculty of Law at The National University of Malaysia is offered to all first year students in second semester as a compulsory course.Students taking this course are made up of students who have different religious backgrounds and ethnicity namely Malay, Chinese, Indian, Sikh, Iban, Kadazan, to name but a few.To Malay ethnic students who are Muslims, Arabic is the language that is familiar to them as compared to students from other ethnicities and religious backgrounds who have never studied Arabic before.It is undeniable that the students face challenges and difficulties during the teaching and learning process.One of the challenges they find is the course materials, which is difficult for them.One of the demotivational factors in learning Arabic language is course materials.Currently, the students use instructional materials provided by the teachers.These teaching materials are a textbook and supplement texts selected from various relevant and reliable sources.Hence, the aim of this paper is to highlight the initial findings of the needs analysis on the course materials to provide insight in order to better design and develop the teaching materials for the Arabic course.