The Quality of Arabic Language Teachers in Malaysia: Facing the Fundamental Issues

Abstract

The effectiveness of teaching and learning that is always reflected through the results obtained by the students actually depends on the quality the teachers. Therefore, many teacher standards have been devised, such as the NBPTS in the United States and the Malaysian Teacher Standards by the Malaysian Ministry of Education. However, there is still the question of their suitability to be used to determine and measure the quality of the Arabic teachers due to the ambiguity of definition and elements used therein. Apart from that, the existence of the one-fit-all quality measurement is also questioned. This paper presents the synthesis study that looks into the methods of how teacher effectiveness in general is measured in the recent teacher assessment studies. The importance of local elements in the quality study is also discussed. This study also takes into consideration the recommendations made by previous studies in the determination of the definition of the student achievement construct as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness and quality of teachers. The Malaysian Teacher Standards are also discussed appropriate to its status within the Malaysian education system. All of the findings are synthesised by the development of a new and comprehensive assessment framework for the quality evaluation of the Arabic teachers from the perspective of Arabic language education in Malaysia. From the synthesis study, the writer would like to propose a logical and practical framework in the teacher assessment field especially for the Arabic Language teachers in Malaysia. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1p544