During the last twenty years Sudan has been going through  a process of Arabizaisation of all public education starting from primary and secondary  schools until 1990 where a governmental decree made Arabic  the medium of instruction in Higher Education. English language became just a subject not a medium of instruction.

Since 2002 the whole situation changed, oil  was discovered in some parts of the country which brought an  influx of foreign investment, a peace treaty was signed with the south (after 45 years of civil war ) stating that English is no longer a foreign language but a second language as it was a first language in the southern parts  of the country. Globally English has gained a huge importance for example in  the fields of medicine and science and so on. Most of the publications were in English. It is the number  1 language of world wide Web. For these reasons a great need  for English language competency arose in Sudan.

But with this great need for English our working situation did not change. We still have classes of over 200 meeting for 2 hours per week  with a total of 90  hours. (45 general English and 45 ESP). Teachers are left to prepare their own materials. No up-to-date libraries  available. No teaching aids available. So the  only thing we can do is to encourage our students  to be autonomous learners. We can  not teach them English but we can show them how to learn English. And by the way the only positive thing in is that 99% of the student are motivated they know when they graduate they  will not find a job or continue their education unless they know English