Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Moral Education (ME) is meant to turn all young individuals into morally autonomous adults by providing them with the required competence to judge for themselves what is morally right. To align with such holistic concepts, the UAE Government has launched ME as a school subject to promote tolerance and introduce universal values that are in accordance with the UAE vision. Many schools where students’ population consists mainly of Arabs have decided to adopt English as the medium of instruction (EMI) in teaching ME even though adopting Arabic as the language of instruction was an option at their disposal. Hence, this study is meant to question employing the EMI policy in teaching ME to Arab students in a private school in Dubai. Since teachers are one of the main stakeholders in the teaching-learning process, their perceptions of the target policy and its impact on students’ understanding of the ME syllabus were investigated through ten semi-structured interviews. A second set of qualitative interviews was administered with three of the senior management personnel at the same school to examine the issue through different binoculars. Results show that most teachers disapprove of the adopted policy; moreover, teachers’ voice was never taken into consideration by the school administration.