REASONS FOR CHOOSING ARABIC LANGUAGE AS A THIRD LANGUAGE: A CASE STUDY IN UITM PERAK

With the increasing demand for Arabic courses in universities in Malaysia, it shows that students has their own reasons for choosing Arabic Language to study. The Arabic as a third language course is an elective subject offered to undergraduate students in UiTM. Starting from June 1999, UiTM has decided that third language courses should become one of the university’s requirement subjects, making it compulsory to all first degree students.  The purpose of this study was to identify the reasons of UiTM students for choosing to study Arabic Language as their third language. The sampling involves 320 students from UiTM, who have enrolled in level 1, 2 and 3 Arabic course. This quantitative field research employs questionnaires and purposive sampling technique as the methods of data collection. The main findings are: most of them choose to learn Arabic language because it is the language of Islam and for them to understand more about Islam and also for worshipping purpose. Besides, most of them choose to learn the language for the purpose of their future career.