Research Paper on UAE: Promoting Multiculturalism and Preserving Core Cultural Practices

Introduction

The United Arab Emirates is a multicultural nation that has attracted many global cultures, people, and language from both the West and the East continents of the world. The primary goal of the multicultural dimension in the UAE is to promote intercultural exchanges to create a more superior model of the society, culture, and even education. Despite the multicultural aspect of the economy and the society in the UAE, the nation seeks to promote the preservation of its core cultural practices and language which are vital in maintaining its cultural identity. The UAE primary goal in education is to preserve its culture and identity through education for generations to come which is a significant source of nationalism in the nation. As such, moral education and transliteration have been put in place to achieve the goal of cultural identity preservation. The embedding of moral education in UAE schools independently is followed up by the ADEK inspectors who ensure that each school has embedded moral values in the curriculum. Increasingly, there has been an observation of the translation of cultural elements into English, which seeks to promote intercultural learning and communication for the bilingual students as they interact with Emiratis in the learning environment.

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Conceptual Framework

Translation is one of the methods of transferring knowledge and information from one language to another, which helps in the acquisition of a new language (Shaheen, 1991: Waeraas & Nielsen, 2016). Transliteration is a type of translation which seeks to change words from one language to another without additional changes in the wording or context which is the case in translation (Regmi, Naidoo, & Pilkington, 2010). Transliteration is the process of translating local dialect information into English without changing the context or the words (Primadesi, 2012). Transliteration occurs through the translation of Emirati cultural knowledge, which is in Khaleeji Arabic dialect to English in UAE. Transliteration has been adopted to ensure that the information does not lose meaning or context.

Significance of the Study

This study seeks to understand how the ministry of education in the UAE has used transliteration in education intending to promote Emirati cultural identity. This study will help understand the historical aspect of nationalism in the UAE and how education has been one of the critical elements that are used to preserve the culture and also to open up the country to other cultures. The research paper will assess the overall process of transliteration and its applicability in the United Arab Emirates curriculum to review the necessary changes that can be introduced to increase cultural knowledge. The research will influence the future direction in transliteration and its practice in UAE by influencing how educators use the method in the classroom and school environment.

Problem Statement

This research seeks to identify the success of transliteration in preserving Emirati cultural identity through the transliteration of Khaleeji Arabic dialect to English in schools to facilitate cultural preservation. There are different methods of promoting cultural identity but in the case of UAE transliteration is used to target bilingual learners to preserve the Emirati cultural integrity in the face of growing cultural influence from the West and East Asian continents. This research will assess how effective is transliteration as a method useful in securing Emirati cultural identity at all levels of education in the UAE.

Research Aim and Objective

The primary aim of this research paper is to understand the success of transliteration comprehensively in promoting cultural identity and preservation in the UAE through the transliteration of Emirati culture from Khaleeji Arabic dialect to English. The research will carry an in-depth analysis to understand the critical elements involved in transliteration, their scope, and the overall approach of implementation. As a multicultural nation, the maintenance of the Emirati culture is not a simple task, primarily due to the growth of influence from western cultures. This paper will establish the current success and standing in terms of maintaining an Emirati cultural image and identity in a multicultural society. The study seeks to answer:

• What is the impact of transliteration in promoting Emirati cultural identity in the UAE as a nation despite a significant influence of foreign cultural elements?
• What is the reception and attitude of students and education administrators towards transliteration in the UAE?
• What is the impact of transliteration in the overall learning quality and education scope in UAE?

Research questions play a significant role in providing the overall direction of research (Farrugia, Petrisor, Farrokhyar, & Bhandari, 2010). The above research questions carry a general scope of the study on transliteration by establishing how transliteration affects the overall cultural identity of the UAE and the opinions of different stakeholders in the UAE education system.

Literature Review

Transliteration is an essential approach of securing UAE's cultural identity by teaching the Emirati culture and moral education in schools, which is transliterated from Khaleeji Arabic dialect to English (Hopkyns, 2017). According to Masri (2012), in the UAE, moral education is used to retain Emirati cultural identity at the school level which has been reinforced by local education policies that are implemented by the ministry of education. According to Picton (2010), the primary goal of the multicultural dimension in the UAE is to promote intercultural exchanges to create a more superior model of the society, culture, and even education. Despite the multicultural aspect of the economy and the society in the UAE, the nation seeks to promote the preservation of its core cultural practices and language which are vital in maintaining the cultural identity of the country (Picton, 2010). Hopkyns (2017), agrees with (Picton, 2010) that the UAE primary goal in education is to preserve its culture and identity through the education of generations to come which as a significant source of nationalism. As such, different programs have been put in place to achieve this goal amongst them transliteration.

In the UAE, Emirati dialect that belongs to the Khaleeji Arabic dialect is the primary approach of preserving its cultural identity. According to Almehairi (2015), oral folk tales using the language are the main instrument used to pass down culture in the UAE since its establishment. In the UAE, Dahan (2015) notes that compulsory Islamic studies and moral education have been adopted at both the primary and the secondary level with transliteration being the fundamental approach of ensuring bilingual students are not excluded. Increasingly, there has been an observation of the translation of cultural elements into English which seeks to promote intercultural learning and communication for the bilingual students as they interact with Emirati in the learning environment (Almehairi, 2015).

Transliteration is used as an approach of learning in the cases where there is an unfamiliar language and has been used in different contexts in history to aid cultural learning and understanding (Al-Azami, Kenner, Ruby, & Gregory, 2010). According to Tabari (2014) and Holes (2011), the UAE has in the last decade invested heavily in the education curriculum to ensure that students are proficient in both English and Arabic to preserve the local Emirati culture and language. Almehairi (2015) agrees with Al-Azami et al. 2010 that the preservation of the Emirati culture has been achieved through transliteration which has been viewed as one of the significant approaches of promoting cultural preservation in a multicultural and bilingual context. According to O'Neill (2017), there is a considerable gap in studies that assesses the overall success of transliteration in maintaining the cultural identity of a nation in the UAE and other countries where it has been pioneered.

Literature Review Analysis

This research will determine the attitudes and reception of transliteration in the UAE by both the students and teachers. The study will seek to establish the literature gap on the functional benefit of transliteration as a vehicle for sustaining cultural identity. The current literature carries out an extensive elaboration of the meaning of transliteration and why it has been implemented in the UAE as a means to promote cultural identity. The literature elaborately establishes the importance of developing cultural identity in the UAE. The available literature identifies transliteration practices while failing to capture the overall success of transliteration in the UAE schools, where it has been put to trial as a method to promote national identity.

Methods

Research Design

Single Case Study Design: The research will use a mixed method research approach in which exploratory case study design and the survey will be used to assess the success of transliteration in improving culture identity in the UAE and its overall impact on learning in the country. The research will use a single case study design to conduct a qualitative assessment of transliteration application in cultural identity promotion (Lobo, Moeyaert, Cunha, & Babik, 2017). The single case study design if deployed successfully, can help in understanding the impact on an intervention (transliteration) in promoting cultural identity. The case study research design plays a significant role in providing an in-depth ontology of transliteration with the ability to carry out a comparison between different participants on their attitudes towards transliteration as an approach to promote cultural identity in UAE.

Cross-Sectional Survey: The research will use a cross-sectional survey which gathers information from respondents within a single point in time (Setia, 2016). In this case, the survey will assess the impact of transliteration in promoting cultural identity in UAE as of 2019. The survey research design will be more critical in this case to determine how translation has impacted Emirati cultural identity. The surveys will target two teachers and two students in AI Ain, a city within Abu Dhabi to assess how the use of transliteration has been effective in promoting cultural identity in the UAE. The survey design is essential in this research because it can help in assessing the opinions, characteristics, and attitudes of individuals in the UAE education sector.

Sampling

Non Probability Sampling - Convenience Sampling: Since the targeted respondents are two teachers and two student's convenience sampling will be a practical approach to select the participants in time from a list of acquaintances working as teachers in Al Ain City as well as two students from the city. However, this sampling method is prone to bias, which can be eliminated by ensuring that the respondents are representative of the UAE population based on gender, age, and occupation. This can be avoided by picking a male teacher and student and a female teacher and student, respectively.

Data Collection

The mode of data collection and reaching out to the respondents significantly affects the overall research results and validity. The initial step in the data collection will be contacting potential respondents chosen through convenient sampling (Bowling, 2005). A letter of introduction will be sent to the respondents a week before the interview to notify them of their participation in the research. The surveys will be delivered in person in t...