ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an experiment that lasted a number of consecutive summers, during which learners were provided with pedagogical tools to shoulder the responsibility of their own learning. In other words, their ability to learn was unleashed. All of them were adult English speakers enrolled in an intensive Arabic summer program. This chapter lays out the theoretical framework on which the instruction was based. A learner-centered approach was adopted. Observation of learner performance, assessment results and survey feedback all indicated learners’ satisfaction and ability to achieve the goals of instruction. The proposed theoretical framework was found to be essential in guiding the educational process aimed at developing measurable language proficiency outcome. The difficulty of implementing this proposed curriculum arises from the uncommon nature of the approach that in some ways differs radically from what most teachers and learners are used to.
