Lecturers’ and Students’ Attitudes towards Language Education Policy at the Tertiary Level in Palestine

Abstract

This paper describes a study designed to investigate faculty of Applied Sciences lecturers’ and students' perception of English and Arabic as media of instruction at the tertiary level in Palestine. The quantitative method which fits the nature of the present study was adopted. The researchers used a questionnaire prepared by Yu (2010) as a main tool to collect the data of the current study. Being validated, the questionnaire was distributed to 50 lecturers and 350 students who were both selected purposefully using purposive sampling . The results indicated that both lecturers and students hold positive attitudes towards English language, nonetheless, they do not favour it as a medium of instruction at the tertiary level. In addition, students showed high preference to the English language since they have greater desires to learn it for both utilitarian and academic reasons. Therefore, a medium of instruction should be designed to achieve this purpose and to enable students to perform successfully in their educational and occupational settings.