‘A classroom is not a classroom if students are talking to me in Berber’: language ideologies and multilingual resources in secondary school English classes in Libya

Abstract

This paper reports on an ethnographic study carried out by Adel Asker in 2009, with teachers and learners, in English classes in a secondary school in the north-west of Libya. Arabic is the official medium of instruction in all Libyan secondary schools, but most teachers and students in this region are Berber speakers. Adel Asker's aim was to investigate the ways in which beliefs and ideologies about ‘appropriate’ language use, embedded in broader socio-cultural, political and historical contexts, were being reproduced through multilingual classroom interaction and codeswitching practices, in local English classes. In this paper, we show how teachers and students’ own accounts of their multilingual practices revealed different beliefs and ideologies about the ‘appropriacy’ of different language choices with teachers and with members of their peer group. We also describe the ways in which students moved in and out of Berber, English and Arabic, employing the contrast between these languages as a communicative resource and as a means of indexing wider cultural values. We demonstrate how they did this in whole-class teacher–student interactions and in student–student interactions, in situated negotiation of language learner identities, sometimes colluding with and sometimes contesting the teachers’ agenda.

Keywords:

• language ideologies
• Berber
• Arabic
• English
• language policy
• Libya

Notes

1. For an account of policy vis-á-vis Berber (Amazigh) in another North African country, see El Aissati, Karsmakers, and Kurvers (2011).

2. The term Hadith denotes actions and/or statements ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions.

3. All names used in the paper are pseudonyms.

4. Transcription conventions (devised by Adel Asker and adapted from Martin-Jones and Saxena (2001)

Character format

ITALICS between square brackets

Translation of Arabic or/and Berber into English

NORMAL Roman font

Transcription for English utterances

BOLD Arabic font

Transcription for Arabic utterances

NORMAL Arabic font (non-bold)

Transcription of Berber utterances

Symbols

< >

Marks the beginning of an utterance in a different language i.e. code switch

<A>

Marks the beginning of an utterance in Arabic

<B>

Marks the beginning of an utterance in Berber

<E>

Marks the beginning of an utterance in English

These symbols are also used in the English translations of the Arabic and Berber utterances

( )

Brackets in the line of speech represent additional information, such as non-verbal actions, e.g. (hesitation);

…

Pause: the number of dots indicates the relative length of each pause.

Full stop

Used after words spoken with falling intonation

Question mark

Rising intonation

Participants

S1, S2 (etc.)

Students identified, but not by name

T

Teacher

5. The mixed Berber–Arabic utterance should be read from the right to left, following the conventions of the Arabic writing system.