Adopting Religious Course’s Translation in Colleges and Universities as an Essential part of English as a Foreign Language Syllabus for Enhancing English Language Learning

Abstract

This study aimed to reveal the role of religious course translation in assisting students to gain professionality in producing well-formed syntactically, terminologically, and semantically English texts. Also, the paper is concerned with reflecting on the importance of including this course as a crucial part of English as a Foreign language syllabus in universities and colleges, explicitly rendering the Holy Quran, Hadiths of the prophet, and general religious texts. The study claimed that religious course translation is an effective tool and approach that helps L2 learners acquire English as a Foreign Language EFL/ESL. The researcher adopted quantitative and qualitative approaches for collecting and analyzing the data. For gathering the data, a questionnaire was conducted among undergraduate EFL/ESL students of level 8 at King Khalid University, Almajardah campus, during the academic year 2023-2024 (1444-1445H). Sixty-two students who studied Religious Course Translation (Eng3-330) in the first and second semesters participated in the study. The majority of the students show positive attitudes toward the effectiveness and appropriateness of the religious course translation as an essential method that helps them to understand some aspects of English as a foreign language, such as correct word order, sentences’ structures, new items of vocabulary, cultural issues, besides the style and genre, all of the mentioned essences helping them in improving their four language skills particularly, their communicative skills. Additionally, the findings confirm the significant role of this course in developing and promoting the students’ overall English language learning, resulting in acquiring English as a Forging Language EL/ESL. The findings of this study will be beneficial for instructors who teach English as a second language and for the syllabi designers.