Reframing Language Roles in Moroccan Higher Education: Context and Implications of the Advent of English

Abstract

Morocco is a multilingual society where different languages are in use. Besides the national and official languages, Moroccans also use a number of foreign languages among which are French, Spanish, and English. Over the last few years, foreign languages have acquired more space and prestige, especially in the educational system. In this respect, the Ministry of Higher Education is promoting the position of the English language through ministerial notes imposing it as a requirement at the doctoral level and for the recruitment of new university professors. With the spread of English as the international language and the language of research and science, current debate concerns also the language of instruction in science streams. The aim of the present study is to address three main research questions, namely ( The study will also analyze the official documents and discourses and the academic literature.

The spread of English in Morocco

“…Recent endeavors to internationalize and improve the outcomes of tertiary education have been accompanied by calls to replace French with English as a medium of instruction (Belhiah & Abdelatif, 2016;Ben Haman, 2020;Kachoub & Hilgendorf, 2019). One key aspect of this spread is that Moroccan universities have witnessed an increasing number of students enrolling in the English department (El Kirat & Laaraj, 2016;Jebbour, 2019). Moroccan scholars have ascribed this spread to the influence of the ideology of modernity on language attitudes (Chakrani, 2013;Chakrani & Huang, 2014), achieving socioeconomic goals (Buckner, 2011;Jaafari, 2019;Ouakrime, 2016), instrumental perspective (Marley, 2004) and English language's lack of association with any colonial connotations for Moroccans (Ennaji, 1991;Zouhir, 2013).…”