This article was downloaded by: [Université du Luxembourg] On: 19 March 2015, At: 07:08 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK International Journal of Multilingualism Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmjm20 Orthographic competence among multilingual school children: writing Moroccan Arabic in France Constanze Wetha a Institute for Research on Multilingualism, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg Published online: 16 Feb 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Constanze Weth (2015) Orthographic competence among multilingual school children: writing Moroccan Arabic in France, International Journal of Multilingualism, 12:2, 196-209, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2015.1009374 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1009374 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 International Journal of Multilingualism, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 2, 196–209, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1009374 Orthographic competence among multilingual school children: writing Moroccan Arabic in France Constanze Weth* Institute for Research on Multilingualism, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg (Received 12 January 2014; accepted 22 June 2014) 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 Introduction Reading and writing acquisition in a multilingual context is related to the roles and functions of any written languages already learnt and is influenced by presuppositions about the correct orthographic forms of those languages. The learning of orthographic principles also contributes to knowledge about the relationship between oral and written language (Michaels & Collins, 1984; Skibbe, Bindman, Hindman, Aram, & Morrison, 2013). An established orthography does not simply reproduce oral speech in the visual Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 medium, but also represents language structures that enable a better cognitive decoding process of graphic symbols. Multilingual learners who are starting to read and write have to deal with different functional systems that rely on ‘the specific rules according to which the units of the system are interpreted in a given language’ (Coulmas, 2013, pp. 17–18). The concept of the word unit differs for example in Arabic and French and this is reflected in the respective writing systems. Learning a second writing system that is built according to the rules of the first writing system facilitates learning because learners often already understand how the new system of written representation will work (Cook & Bassetti, 2005). *Email: [email protected] © 2015 Taylor & Francis International Journal of Multilingualism 197 As they begin to read and write, children learn to represent the oral structures of the written language in a specific script and according to the specific orthographic and grammatical rules of each writing system. They learn this by memorizing the orthographic form of words and by discovering the underlying orthographic and grammatical rules (Perfetti, 1998). For teachers and researchers, it is not always easy to know whether the writing of children relies on memorized word images or whether orthographic knowledge has been activated. In order to understand children’s approaches to orthography, researchers have elicited non-sense words (Goswami, Gombert, & de Barrera, 1998) or asked children to write in an oral vernacular that has no written form. Maas and Mehlem (2003, 2005), for example, asked children of Moroccan background, growing up in Germany and Morocco, to write in their family language, either Moroccan Arabic (MA) or Tarifit, neither of which has a formally recognized written version. Maas and Mehlem (2003) analysed the writing of the children using a matrix script framework that takes into account three domains of linguistic knowledge: (1) implicit knowledge of the oral structures in the first language, (2) explicit knowledge of Roman and Arabic script systems and (3) knowledge of the specific orthographic and grammatical rules of each writing system. Their analysis highlighted the extent to which the children relied, in the writing of their family language, on the underlying structures of their already known writing systems, German or Standard Arabic (SA). The process of learning to read and write is seen here as being based, on the one hand, on the implicit knowledge of oral structures and, on the other hand, on explicit teaching, which is related to literacy practices at home and at school. The present study continues the research of Maas and Mehlem (2003), again focusing on the writing of MA children, this time in France. The children investigated were eight to nine years old; spoke both MA and French; were alphabetized in French, the school language; and attended a Standard Arabic (SA) class. The main question addressed in the study is: when children conceive a writing system for their family language MA, how do they make use of spelling rules they have learned in French? A secondary question asks if the Arabic writing practices in their families obstruct the children’s access to spelling rules. The reasoning behind this second question is that the expectations for reading and writing appear to differ between home and school. To better understand the orthographic forms in the children’s writing, these questions are discussed in the light of family and school literacy practices. Conceiving a writing system Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 All writing systems are graphic systems for representing a language. An orthography comprises a particular set of rules for representing the words of a specific language. For each newly written language, stable graphic solutions must be found that are accepted by readers and writers with diverse local and regional oral varieties of the language. Instead of representing the sounds of speech, alphabetic orthographies as well as all written languages represent abstract linguistic units like phonemes, phonological syllables and morphemes. This is why the decoding process can play a role in the development of the readers’ metalinguistic awareness (Myhill, 2012; Pacton, Deacon, Borchardt, Danjon, & Fayol, 2012). The coherent and consistent choices of a writing system become, over time, conventional within a community and associated with symbolic, ideological meanings and power (Coulmas, 2003). In this way, orthographies are social practices (Sebba, 2007). The school is the institution that claims validity for and disseminates a standard form of writing and its related values. Writing in schools is related to a conscious monitoring of 198 C. Weth the text to an elaborated code and the visible aim of acquiring the ‘prestige language’ (Kahane, 1986). As the institution most related to writing (Halliday, 1989; Schleppegrel, 2004), schools still have a small tolerance of variation in the produced texts because texts considered adequate must be integrated within a particular framework of text types and are measured on orthographic and grammatical