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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.
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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
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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).
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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 correctness (Bourdieu, 1967; Collins, 1996). If there are two particularly strong literacy cultures that claim different values and literacy learning objectives, such as the French and Arabic discussed here, the process of literacy acquisition may be impacted. Both languages rely on recognized standard varieties and are associated with academic language practices. However, these language practices differ fundamentally. Written French is associated with the ideas of education and civilization dating from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Furet & Ozouf, 1977; Holthoon, 2009), while more recently, literacy skills have been defined within the framework of the ‘Information Age’ (OECD, 2000). In French schools, the process of learning to read and write is consequently associated with the transformation, correction and elaboration of a text. On the other hand, written Arabic is closely related to the Koran and to rituals that fulfil the religious obligations of Muslims (Haeri, 2009; Wagner, 1993). There is a focus on the aesthetic appearance of the text, which is comparable to the holistic perception of images. This focus appears to be particularly strong in the Moroccan diaspora, which lacks the diversity of uses of Arabic literacy present in Morocco where written Arabic is used for multiple purposes. This means that for the Moroccan diaspora in France, access to heterogeneous literacy practices is limited to French, while written Arabic seems to correspond only to Arabic Koranic literacy. As writing is conceived for a distant reader, establishing an orthographic system implies constraints on readability. One constraint can be seen in the phonemic accuracy of alphabetic writing. One important aspect here is that writers succeed in representing phonemes in different contexts in such a regular way that readers are easily able to decode the representations. The representation can be difficult because orthographies rely on different linguistic layers and contain underspecified graphemes (Neef, 2005). This is the case in, for example, English, when maps onto different phonemes as in case, cat, call, cart. The analysis presented in this paper supports the claim that alphabetic scripts not only represent phonologic segments but also designate prosodic, morpholo- gical and syntactical structures (Jaffré & Fayol, 2006). The aim of this study is to deepen understanding of the orthographic structuring carried out by the children. As the children have been alphabetized in French, they rely first of all on French orthography to write MA. Therefore, additionally, their writing in Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 MA tells us something about their competence in French orthography. The principal finding of this paper is that the children’s writing in MA exhibits a high level of structuring and a deep appropriation of the French writing system taught at school. The paper initially offers some background to the study, including a discussion of the children’s family and school literacies. It then presents the results of the analysis of the children’s writing in MA.
The study Ten children, five girls and five boys, participated in the study. They were selected for the orthographic analyses because they had previously participated in an earlier ethnographic study (Weth, 2008). The children, aged eight to nine years, were all born in France and grew up with MA and French. They lived in the same suburb and attended the fourth International Journal of Multilingualism 199
grade of primary school in their district, defined as a deprived area (Moisan & Simon, 1997; Van Zanten, 2001). The investigated school, like French public schools in general, is a monolingual institution primarily aiming to develop French language abilities and also literacy abilities related to school (cf. De Ruiter, 2008; Hélot, 2008). Lessons are therefore delivered in French. In addition, the children attend optional Arabic classes offered at school for two hours per week over two years. The classes are part of a program for learning the language of origin, Enseignement des Langues et Cultures d’Origine (ELCO), which is offered by the Moroccan embassy. It should be noted that the SA taught in these classes is a distant variety of the children’s first language, MA, and that the children have, in general, a very low competence in SA (cf. Obdejn & de Ruiter, 1998; Petek, 2004). Following an earlier study (Weth, 2008) that provided background data related to the children’s SA and French literacy practices, the children were asked to write a picture story in both French and MA (Plauen, 1993). As with the 2003 study by Maas and Mehlem (2003), the children were asked to create a writing system for MA, the familiar oral language they had never before written. They had to, for example, create phoneme– grapheme correspondences and find solutions for consistent representation of lexemes and morphemes, as well as for the spaces between word boundaries. This task required the children to rely on their knowledge of the writing systems they had already acquired: French and SA. French, the language of schooling, could be expected to be the obvious choice for them as it is the language of alphabetization, even though there is no structural familiarity between the Romance language French and the Semitic language MA. However, SA is present in the Arabic class and in Koranic writing familiar to the families, and therefore it could also play a significant role due to the structural similarity of the language varieties and the high prestige of SA in the families. In either case, explicit knowledge derived from orthographic and grammar instruction is combined with implicit knowledge developed in the process of learning to read and write (Mehlem, 2007).
The social background of the children’s writing The children’s parents grew up in Morocco with most attending primary school (Koranic School) for a few years. Since migrating to France, they were agricultural workers, a job that does not require them to read and write. While family members attested to only limited involvement in individual reading and writing, the families joined together in reading and writing practices. Family members need French literacies to communicate with French institutions, for example, in matters of school and health care. Here they Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 practised reading and writing collectively, guided by one person who was often an older daughter who had grown up in France. This ‘literacy guide’ translates/interprets between the French and MA languages and between the written and oral modes (Weth, 2008). Families value highly the competences of the ‘literacy guide’, which they perceive contribute to family solidarity. In contrast, individual reading and writing in French is not seen as a relevant practice and the efforts one has to make to learn to read and write and to elaborate a text do not appear to be perceived as important within the families (Weth, 2008). The families’ literacies in French are hence not equivalent to the literacies expected at school (Laghzaoui, 2008). French is nevertheless a language of everyday communication, as is MA. On the other hand, no one in the participants’ families communicates through either oral or written SA. Rather, SA, in this Moroccan diaspora, is closely related to highly esteemed religious practices that do not require an understanding of the text. In the oral 200 C. Weth
Figure 1. An example of a ‘cadre’ in a family apartment.
mode, it is present in sermons on TV and in the written mode, it is represented in the Koranic calligraphy typically displayed in domicile apartments. Figure 1 shows a type of Koranic verse often exhibited in the family living room. The families called these calligraphies ‘cadre’, the French word for frame, emphasizing the status of a sacred entity. Figure 2 shows a page of the Koran typically read by family members. The text is presented in three columns. The right side shows the Arabic original; in the centre is an alphabetic phonetic transliteration according to French; the left side gives the French translation. This text structure enables the family members to articulate the Arabic text and to understand the text without being functionally literate in SA. The calligraphy of both the Koranic verses and the language SA is, for the children’s parents, intimately related. They are associated with religious and spiritual experiences and evoke memories of the parents’ country of origin, Morocco (cf. Wagner, 1993). SA thus seems to be related to the ‘language of sacred revelation, the language in which God revealed the Koran to Mohammed’ (Owens, 1995, p. 181). Some parents transfer this status of the Koran to written texts in general. In consequence, texts are perceived as graphic entities that are to be beautifully written rather than elaborated upon, transformed Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015
Figure 2. A page from the Koran, read by the family members. International Journal of Multilingualism 201
Table 1. Illustration of the structures of SA and MA. ﻛﺮﯾﻢ ﯾﺴﻜﻦ ﻓﯽ ﺩﺍﺭ ﻛﺒﯿﺮﺓ ﻣﻊ ﺃﺳﺮﺗﻪ Written realization Translation Karim lives in a big house with his family. Phonic realization SA [kariːm jaskunu fiːdaːr kabiːra maʕa ʔusratihi] Phonic realization MA [karim səkn f-dar kbira mʕa ʕailtu]
and corrected. This holistic perception of the role of written Arabic contrasts strongly with the role of the written French taught at school. The Standard Arabic class, for all children of Moroccan origin, was held twice a week and during class time at the school. It aimed to promote and to valorize Arabic (cf. García-Sánchez, 2010). However, since the language of instruction was MA, SA had a limited role in the sessions. Its use was restricted to the examples in the lesson units, which were presented in a rather monotonous form that provided no opportunity for student interaction and required students to echo and memorize. This form of instruction did not enable the children to read and write Arabic independently, although some children acquired a certain knowledge of Arabic script and memorized some orthographic words (Weth, 2008). In addition to the language pedagogy, the diglossic situation between the highly valued holy SA and the spoken vernacular MA prevented almost any possibility of the children deriving familiar structures from SA. Table 1 illustrates the structures of SA and MA based on a sentence produced in one Arabic lesson.
Results of the MA orthographic analysis All 10 children in the study wrote at least one story in French. Nine wrote at least one story in MA. Altogether, the children produced 16 French stories containing on average 55 words and 12 MA stories containing on average 22 words. Two children first chose Arabic script for the MA stories. After writing the first letters, however, they crossed out what they had written, and all pupils completed their stories in Roman script. The following reproduction of one child’s story in both French and MA gives an initial insight into the texts. The French text (Figure 3) illustrates that the fourth grade pupil Anissa is familiar with phoneme–grapheme correspondences, separates orthographic words and correctly spells certain words (
Figure 3. An example of the writing in French: text of the pupil Anissa. 202 C. Weth
Figure 4. An example of the writing in MA: text of the pupil Anissa.
morphological regularities of the French orthography. One main difficulty in French is that some written forms of subject–verb agreement are not noticeable in speech (cf. Pacton, Sobaco, Fayol & Treiman, 2013; Pacton et al., 2012). The Moroccan text (Figure 4) reveals how Anissa harnessed French phonemes and graphemes to create a new writing system for MA. To represent MA phonemes that do not exist in French, she used written features of the French she knew, for example /ʔ/in
Table 2. French diacritics in Moroccan writing.
Reading pronunciation Children’s writing English translation
Waħd oiède, oirêde indef. article l-ħzam l’ezème, lérêsama the rein ᵵaħ-u téroeh to fall (perfective, 3 plural) l-ʕawd l’éoude, laulôde the horse l-ʔmud émoude, lérmoude the stick dɛr-u dère, délot to do (perfective, 3 plural) rˁ-rˁaʒl ragèl, l’ragél the man kɛjn quéine to be (perfective 3 singular) International Journal of Multilingualism 203
Table 3. Words ending on consonants represented with final
Reading pronunciation Children’s writing English translation
fuq fouge on (preposition) l-arᵭ lalde, lade the ground l-ħzam l’hezme, l’ezème the rein l-ʔmud lermoude, émoude the stick rˁaʒl ragerre, rajelle, larale man waħd oiède, hoieurde, oirêde indef. article wld oulde, olede, laulôde boy l-ʕawd l’é oude, laroude the horse ᵵlag tlage to release (perfective, 3 singular) i-ʒls ijelise to sit down (imperfective, 3 singular)
Table 4. Insertion of schwa, represented by
Reading pronunciation Children’s writing English translation
rˁ-rˁaʒll’agel, lagelle, l’ragél the man l-ħzam l’hezme, l’ezème, lérêsama the rein xʃba racheba, eurcheba, rajeba wood i-ʒls ijelise to sit down (imperfective, 3 singular) i-ᵭnn-u il denout to get up (imperfective, 3 singular)
Table 3 consists of words that end on a consonant sound but take a final orthographic
Table 5. The graphic representation of the definite marker.
Written in one Isolated Separated with Reading word with orthographic apostrophe from Absent or implicit pronunciation the noun word the noun definite marker
rˁ-rˁaʒl lajul, lagelle l’agel, l’ragél rajelle, rajul l-wld loudo, laulôde l howld l’haud oulde, olede l-arᵭ lalde, larde l-ħzma lérêsama l’hezme, l’azme hazme, assem l-ʕmud lérmoude émoude l-ʕawd laoud, léoude l’éoude, l’houd aoude, roude l-blɑ̃ʃ la blanche 204 C. Weth
Table 6. Representation of the preposition and its complement.
Preposition and Prep Prep#noun English complement Prep#def+noun +def#def+noun (without def.) translation
fi l-arᵭ fait laddee, file lalde, on the ground fe lede file larde fi l-ʕawd fiet laroude, fil lhoud fait aoude fi roude on the horse file l’houd fi waħdl-ʕawd fe houad laoud on a horse maʔa l-wld-u maha loudo, maha olede with his boy maa louado
vowel schwa, which is rarely present in spontaneous speech (for example, fenêtre (‘window’) pronounced as [fnɛtʁ]). Its phonological status remains unclear (Tranel, 1987). Consonant clusters are much more frequent in MA than in French. However, MA contains the unstable vowel schwa as well. It is not part of the lexicon and is seldom present in spontaneous rapid speech. In lento speech, schwa can be present in the syllabic combination of an opening movement and a closing movement and optimizes grammatical transparency (Grüter, 2012). Arabic script, however, represents neither short vowels nor schwa (Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2005). The words in Table 4 contain
(1) Some pupils still wrote the beginning of the noun with
(3) Some children used an apostrophe to mark the boundary between the definite marker and the noun. Common in French for representations of a proclitic and its base (Meisenburg, 2000), the apostrophe is a clever solution in the writing (
Table 6 presents the children’s writing of prepositions. In French orthography, prepositions have a status as orthographic words, mostly independent of the following article. This holds, for example, for sur (‘on’)asinsur le tapis (‘on the carpet’). In two cases, the preposition and the masculine article merge into one monosyllabic form. This is the case with à+lein au marché (‘at the market’) and de + le in du voisin (‘from the male neighbour’). The preposition in Arabic holds, as in French, the initial position of the prepositional phrase. Prepositions can be represented as isolated words or as part of the following complement. There is no decisive phonological or grammatical reason for one or the other representation; it depends rather on the number of letters in the preposition. If the preposition is written with two letters, it holds the status of an maʔa](‘with’). If the preposition is written with only one]<ﻣﻊ> orthographic word, as in -bi-surur](‘with]<ﺑﺴﺮﻭﺭ> letter, it is part of the following orthographic form, as in pleasure’; Mehlem, 2012, p. 402). The children’s writing contains only two prepositions, [fi](‘at’) and [maʔa](‘with’). The latter, [maʔa], is an orthographic word, following Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 Arabic and French rules. In all instances, the children wrote it as an isolated word and added the definite marker to the following noun. In contrast, [fi] in MA is frequently produced as [f] and could cause a conflict in writing. All the children however wrote [fi] as an isolated word. The prepositional phrases used by the children contained the definite marker and the noun. Most of the representations of the definite marker followed the Arabic pattern and the children wrote the definite marker as one word with the noun (once with an apostrophe), for example
order to be in line with preposition + article combinations in French and the second definite marker with the noun in order to follow Arabic rules (cf. Maas & Mehlem, 2003). Beyond the presented writing, only one word in the children’s writing referred to a lexical form in SA [rˁ-rˁaʤul], pronounced [rˁ-rˁaʒl]inMA(‘the man’). The forms are
Discussion Orthographic analysis has been used to answer the first and main question of this paper, ‘When children conceive a writing system for their family language MA, how do they make use of spelling rules they have learned in French?’ The analysis demonstrates that the children generally adopted in their writing the orthographic rules of French, for example, for representing phonemes with graphemes and word boundaries. The matrix script of the children is therefore French. This finding is in line with the results of the study for German orthography by Maas and Mehlem (2003), upon which our study was based. Both studies provide evidence that the rules of the first writing system acquired through formal instruction shape our conception of graphic units and are transferred to other languages when we write them, without us having acquired them in a formal instructional setting. The children in this study not only represented their first language in the Roman script system, they also used knowledge they had gained at school about specific orthographic and grammatical rules of French to conceive a writing system for their family language. The children’s writing clearly demonstrates their access to orthographic and grammatical structures and indicates a cultural accommodation to the instructed orthography of French. This orientation does not only consists of phonographic components but also represents some morpho-syntactic features according to French orthography, for example, the use of the apostrophe in the MA language to represent the definite article. The most salient examples, however, are on the level of phoneme– grapheme correspondences with the use of French graphemes to represent MA phonemes that do not occur in French. That the children’s writing clearly reflects the framework of Downloaded by [Université du Luxembourg] at 07:09 19 March 2015 the French conception of written language is not unexpected, as the extent of writing the children do in French is much greater than their writing in Arabic. The children’s literacy knowledge of SA did not appear to enable such a structured approach. None of the children adopted the SA writing system to represent MA. Despite their exposure to SA in the SA class, none of the children accessed either the SA script or the SA writing system. This can be explained by their lack of rigorous instruction in the SA writing system as well as by the holistic perception of written texts in the families. The most salient rules of written Arabic would have been the representation of the lexical root, the omission of short vowels and a constant representation of the definite marker as a prefix. These were not evidenced in the children’s texts. The second question asked if the Arabic writing practices in the children’s families obstruct the children’s access to spelling rules. We asked this question because there appeared to be a difference in the expectations of children’s reading and writing ability at International Journal of Multilingualism 207
home and at school. Whereas school literacies expected individuality and monolingual- ism, and required an ongoing monitoring and elaboration of texts, family literacies were frequently performed collaboratively and integrated several languages and registers. Families did not seem to focus attention on individual writing or on processes of self- monitoring of writing acquisition. Rather, family members showed their recognition of the prestigious status of the SA Koranic calligraphy in which the written text is perceived as a static entity. The attitudes to writing in the children’s homes are likely to have been different in homes with broader Arabic literacy practices (Maas & Mehlem, 2005). As the respective competences, associations and practices are difficult to transfer from one writing system to another, these differences between the literacy practices of home and school could lead to the interpretation that family and school literacies hinder each other. However, as the research showed, this proved not to be the case. The orthographic analysis indicated that the framework of Arabic writing that is associated with Koranic writing in the families and available in the SA class did not support access to literacy in Arabic. However, it did not oppose the acquisition of French writing either. In fact, the ad hoc writing of the vernacular family language highlighted the literacy resources of the children that often remain unappreciated in their French writing.
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.
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