The Effectiveness of a Language Immersion Program in Acquiring Functional Language Skills among Learners of Arabic as a Second Language.

The aim of this research was to gauge the efficacy of a languageimmersion program in fostering functional language skills among learners ofArabic as a second language. To achieve this, a quasi-experimental designwas employed, comprising an experimental and a control group. Each groupconsisted of 35 third-level learners from Al-Misbah School for Arabic Languageand Islamic Studies in Riyadh. The research materials and instrumentsincluded: a taxonomy of functional language skills, a functional languageskills rubric, and a language immersion program. The results revealedstatistically significant differences at the 0.05 level between the mean scoresof the experimental and control groups on the post-test of the functionallanguage skills scale, favoring the learners in the experimental group. Theprogram's effectiveness ratio in acquiring functional language skills amongthe experimental group learners was 1.31. Based on these findings, theresearch proffered several recommendations, including the imperative offocusing on leveraging language immersion programs as a means ofaugmenting the acquisition of functional language skills among learners ofArabic as a second language.