After the Second World War, the field of Foreign Language Teaching witnessed an extraordinary growth, together with the proliferation of new teaching methods. People entered the globalization era and felt the necessity to communicate with one another on an international level. The pendulum of teaching, which had swung for centuries between the grammar-translation method and the natural method in Europe, was now moving faster, as a series of approaches were created, all supported by scientific scrutiny and research as well as scholars who dedicated their attention to linguistics and its practical applications.

Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, as we know it today, is a collective product of these times; it is a subject that sprung from the contact between the reflections made by Arab scholars after national independences and those made by the rest of the world, especially by those scholars who operated in the nerve centers of Arabic language studies and applied linguistics outside the Arab world. Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (hereafter TAFL), known in Arabic as taʿlīm al-ʿarabiyya li-ġayr al-nāṭiqīn bi-hā, originated in the Arab world in the 1960s and developed significantly during the following decade. It has undergone several transformations and has expanded in different directions to the present day. This subject is also rooted in historical concerns, a condition prevailing in contemporary education issues (Reble, p. 14). Accordingly, the aim of this first chapter is to provide a wide historical background, in order to explain the events leading to the birth of this subject. Subsequently, its main historical occurrences will be considered in relation to the institutes and scientific poles that promoted certain theories, approaches, methods and methodologies, as well as the scholars who generated them as they gathered at these institutes and crowded the scientific scene. To a functional extent, innovation in the field of education and Foreign Language Teaching in the Arab world will be also analyzed, so as not only to have a complete overview of the topic, but also to infer the influence of the debate around these disciplines on the development of TAFL and make comparisons with the trends in language learning and teaching that originated outside the Arab world.