Digital Resources and Pedagogical Limitations in Arabic Language Teaching of English-Medium Schools in Bangladesh

The growth of English-based education in Bangladesh, specifically on Cambridge and Oxford models, has restructured linguistic hierarchies and teaching interests in formal education. Here, the teaching of Arabic language is peripheral and is mostly only restricted to a few Islamic-oriented English-language schools. Meanwhile, online materials are popularly marketed as means of updating programmes in language teaching and overcoming the limitations of instruction. The paper is a critical study of the pedagogical constraints that are related to the application of digital resources in the teaching of Arabic in English-media schools in Bangladesh. The qualitative research design is based on critical pedagogy and sociocultural theory policies which provides in-depth interviews with teachers, students, alumni, and experts of Arabic language education and is supported by document analysis. The results show that despite the rise in the use of digital tools in Arabic classrooms, there is a lack of integration, under-theorised and often unrelated to the linguistic peculiarities of Arabic. Further, the use of English as a mediating language, teacher training, and the peripheral position of Arabic in the school curriculum inhibit the transformative opportunity of digitalization. Technology instead of changing pedagogy significantly tends to replicate the current constraints of instructions and the superficial approaches to learning. The research claims that the effective integration of digital materials presupposes the critical interaction between the ideologies of language, professional growth of teachers, and curriculum coherence.