Recent research on Arabic language learning has grown to account for various aspects of Arabic teaching not only in United States contexts but also around the world. There are still notable gaps in this area of research, however; for one, there is a paucity of work on Arabic education in the Canadian context. This presentation aims to contribute to understandings of Arabic learning in Canada by examining students’ perspectives on in-class group work in a Canadian Arabic program. Activities in which students work in pairs and small groups are central features of many Arabic language classes, particularly those that incorporate the Communicative Approach to language learning. Understanding students’ experiences of participating in pair and group work activities can provide insight into what factors make this type of work most effective and thus inform future practice. This presentation analyzes and discusses results of a study that investigated experiences of elementary-level Arabic students at a Canadian university, focusing on students’ experiences of working with peers during small-group activities. The presentation will start by providing a brief overview of the Arabic program that is the focus of this study, highlighting structural features of the program and placing them into the context of Arabic courses in the Canadian university landscape. As at most Canadian universities, classes in this program contain a mix of heritage learners of Arabic and students of Arabic as a foreign language. A high proportion of students in the Arabic program are heritage learners of Arabic, and these heritage learners are diverse in both the varieties of Arabic of which they have previous knowledge and in their motivations for enrolling in a university Arabic course. In the study, first-semester Arabic students completed questionnaires in which they were asked about aspects of their experience in their Arabic class, including open-ended questions about what elements helped and hindered their participation in group work during class. The most prominent and frequently mentioned factors that students listed were other group members’ willingness to contribute actively and the perception that they had the same level of Arabic skills as their group members. The status of classmates as heritage learners or foreign-language learners of Arabic was not a salient component in the students’ answers, an observation that supports findings of previous research on this topic. The presentation will conclude with recommendations, suggested by the study’s results, for making in-class group work most effective.