Orthographic competence among multilingual school children: writing Moroccan Arabic in France

Abstract

This paper presents children's writing in their vernacular family language, Moroccan Arabic. It first provides some background to the family and school literacies of nine-year-old children of Moroccan Arabic (MA) background growing up in France with French literacy practices at school and Written Arabic literacy practices in the home. The paper then presents the results of an orthographic analysis of the children's attempts to write their vernacular family language, MA, an Arabic dialect not generally used for written purposes. When writing MA for the first time, the children have to rely on the implicit and explicit knowledge of the writing systems they have already acquired, namely, French, the language of schooling, and Standard Arabic which is regularly present in the home, although the children's competence in it is limited. The children's writing in Moroccan Arabic is highly structured and shows how the children harness French orthographic rules to conceive the new writing system.

Keywords:

• orthographic transfer
• writing acquisition
• French
• Arabic
• family
• primary school

Summary

The study extends previous research (Maas & Mehlem, 2003) on how children master spelling rules when they write their family language for the first time. The children in this study learn French at school and some SA. They live in a home context in which SA is prestigious. The children’s experiences and knowledge of writing in French and Arabic are the basis for their idiosyncratic representations in their vernacular family language. In writing Moroccan Arabic for the first time, the children relied on their knowledge of the French writing system and demonstrated their strong linguistic and metalinguistic abilities. The orthographic analysis of the children’s ad hoc writing in MA shows the specific orthographic resources that children use to access literacy, highlights the children’s deep appropriation of the French writing system, and, in doing so, reveals literacy resources that often remain invisible to teachers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.