The Elephant in the Room: Is a Nationwide English Language Policy Needed in EFL Contexts? A Study on English Departments in Saudi Arabian Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both English and Arabic are used in Saudi higher education institutions. Research on English language policies (ELPs) in the Saudi context is limited, highlighting the need for further examination of their implementation and nature. This study investigates the need to introduce a top-down ELP in the Saudi higher education context and the best way to apply this policy from the perspectives of instructors and administrators. A mixed-method approach to data collection was employed: official documentation was analyzed and an online survey, with an open-ended section for faculty members affiliated with Saudi higher education English departments across the country (n=210), was employed. Thereafter, semi-structured interviews were conducted with chairpersons and vice-chairs of university English departments (n=8). The findings suggest that although the majority of English departments recognize the importance of using ELPs, they have either not introduced them or have practiced them implicitly, with a high degree of flexibility that has led to these policies playing a marginal role in academia. The study concludes by encouraging policymakers to design a unified framework for ELPs with the involvement of representatives from university English departments. Other implications are also discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".