الملخص الإنجليزي
This study sought answers for the following questions : 1- What are the problems of teaching rhetoric in the Omani secondary schools as viewed by third secondary students , Arabic teachers and educational supervisors ? 2- What are the reasons for such problems ? 3- What are the proposed solutions to remedy these problems ? To answer these questions ,the researcher designed two question - naires , the first of which was administered to third secondary male and female students of both majors to find out the most prominent problems they encounter in learning rhetoric. The second question naire was given to Arabic teachers and Arabic educational supervis ors, in order to identify the problems of teaching rhetoric in the Omani secondary schools and to suggest solutions for them. The researcher established the validity for both questionnaires by handing them out to jurors . The researcher also used the Alpha - Cronbach Formula to calculate their reliability. The reliability coefficient for the first ques tionnaire was 0.82 and for the second was 0.88 . The sample of the study was made up of (820) subjects constitut - ing 7% of all the third secondary students in the Sultanate , (70) teachers constituting 11.5% of the total number of Arabic secondary school teachers, and (25) Arabic educational supervisors making up 62.5% of all of the Arabic educational supervisors in the country in the 1993/1994 academic year. The researcher used frequencies and percentages in the treatment of the responses of the students , the teachers, and the educational su pervisors to the above mentioned questionnaires. The results of the study revealed several problems in learning rhe toric in secondary schools : (1) the lack of motivation on the part of the students to learn rhetoric , (2) weakness of students' Arabic in general , (3) lack of literary appreciation skills , (4) shortage of exam ples in lessons of rhetoric ,(5) difficulty of the subject , (6) weakness of vocabulary , (7) lack of visual aids in teaching rhetoric ,(8) the lim ited use of extra curricular activities in developing literary apprecia tion , and (9) the students inability to use what they have learned in rhetoric in their every day lives. The proposed solutions for these problems are : (1) eliminating the influences of philosophy and logic from rhetoric , (2) introducing the toric in an interesting manner that is conducive to literary appreciation from the beginning of secondary school after introducing it in prepar atory schools, (3) presenting rhetoric through good literary texts , (4) exploiting extra curricular activities in teaching rhetoric, (5) using vis ual aids that are suitable for teaching rhetoric , and (6) applying rhe toric as much as possible in the classrooms. The study offered the following recommendations : 1- Rhetoric should be taught using the unit teaching technique. 2- More attention has to be paid to the pre-service and in-service training programs of Arabic language teachers. 3- Using the recent findings in language research to improve the teaching of rhetoric. 4- Literary expression has to receive more attention than what is actu ally taking place at the present. 5- More field studies are needed in the following areas : (a) evaluation of the content of the rhetoric curriculum in the Sultanate , (b) identif icaton of literary appreciation skills required for the secondary school students , (c) evaluation of Arabic teacher's performance in teaching rhetoric and the effect of extra - curricular activities on the development of literary appreciation for secondary school students
