What is more disturbing and troubling in the countries which located in North of Africa is the fact that the same mindset of language teaching through translation is not limited to teachers of English and French only but it has also been slithering slowly but surely to plague teachers of Arabic who use Arabic to teach standard Arabic including teachers of Science, Math, History, Geography, Business and Physics who use Arabic as the language of teaching. As one may see, the whole system of language teaching nationwide is doomed, depriving younger generations from empowering their speaking and listening skills in standard Arabic while hindering them from other language competencies caused by translation. What makes the situation even sadder is that the leadership acts like an accomplice ignoring the consequences of such destructive approaches in language teaching.
In this way, language skills cannot be refined and improved if not used and practiced constantly and continuously in the classroom. Translating is just a killer as such a habit deprives language teachers and language learners alike from blossoming and beaming in the new language. Foreign language teachers are teachers and not translators. Indeed, so many teachers of English will suffer in the coming years from such pedagogical mistakes fed by the concept of translation. That is, when teaching a foreign language, teachers are encouraged to use any technique to convey their message except translating to avoid any language conflict in the process of learning. Also, if any teacher translates once to his students, those students will be asking him to do so every time about any new word that they don't understand. Consequently, that teacher will be trapped and tempted to translate even if he doesn't want to because he is the one who started this tricky business.
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