- Title
- Introduction
- Creator
- Moskovsky, Christo; Picard, Michelle
- Relation
- English as a Foreign Language in Saudi Arabia New Insights into Teaching and Learning English p. 1-4
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/English-as-a-Foreign-Language-in-Saudi-Arabia-New-Insights-into-Teaching/Moskovsky-Picard/p/book/9780367484071
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- For a number of political, cultural, and economic reasons, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a special status in the Middle East. It is the largest country in this part of the world, with a population of about 29 million. It is the birthplace of lslam, hosting two to three million pilgrims annually from all over die world visiting the revered holy cities of Madinah and Makkah. Saudi Arabia is by far the largest producer and exporter of crude oil in the world; the latter alone provides up to 75% of Saudi Arabia's budget revenues. Taking advantage of the quite substantial petro-wealth accumulated over several decades, a number of successive Saudi Governments have more recently engaged in a nation-building enterprise the magnitude of which has absolutely no precedent in human history. The Government's Scholarship program launched in the early 2000s has been a critical part of this nation-building effort. The scholarship program which involves funding the tertiary studies of a large number of Saudi nationals at offshore institutions is in essence a prodigious investment in human resources - a campaign to upskill a new generation of Saudis and in this way to build a very highly educated, skilled, and knowledgeable nation. A crucially important added benefit of this initiative has been that it effectively has served to open up the traditionally conservative Saudi community to the wider world and thus prepare it for life in a very globalised 21st century.
- Description
- 1st ed.
- Subject
- Saudi Arabia; learning English; Islam
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1452321
- Identifier
- uon:44409
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781317421214
- Language
- eng
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