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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
a

Adel Asker & Marilyn Martin-Jones

Mosaic Centre for Research in Multilingualism, School of

Education , University of Birmingham , Edgbaston , Birmingham ,
United Kingdom
Published online: 20 May 2013.

To cite this article: Adel Asker & Marilyn Martin-Jones (2013) 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, Language and Education, 27:4, 343-355, DOI:
10.1080/09500782.2013.788189
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2013.788189

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Language and Education, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 343355, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2013.788189

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
Adel Asker and Marilyn Martin-Jones
Mosaic Centre for Research in Multilingualism, School of Education, University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom

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(Received 18 March 2013; final version received 18 March 2013)

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 Askers 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 teacherstudent interactions and in studentstudent 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

The sociolinguistic background to the study

The vast majority of Libyans are Arabic-speaking, but people from the Berber minority
group, which represents between 10% and 15% of the population of Libya, speak Berber
and Arabic. Although Arabic arrived in North Africa fourteen centuries ago, the strong
association between Arabic and Islam has allowed Arabic to continue to dominate the
linguistic landscape of the region. In modern history, the dominance of Arabic has been
made even greater by government policies and constitutional arrangements in different
nation states in the region. In Libya, only Arabic was recognized as the language of the
nation on Independence from the Italian colonizers in 1952. The Berber language (also
known as Tamazight) is the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Libya. It is the
only other local language spoken in Libya, alongside Arabic. Berber-speaking people live
in towns and villages that are concentrated in the north-west of Libya along the Nafosa
mountain range which extends from the south of Tripoli towards the south-west.
Under the Gaddafi regime, Libya remained the only North African country with a
Berber population which not only refused to recognize the Berber language, but also
refused to recognize the existence of Berber-speaking people as a minority group.1 In

Corresponding author. Email: m.martinjones@bham.ac.uk


C 2013 Taylor & Francis

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A. Asker and M. Martin-Jones

fact, the former governments attitude towards languages other than Arabic was so extreme
that it prohibited the display of non-Arabic writing systems in public spaces such as road
signs, advertisement billboards, or commercial units such as shops. In the mid-1970s, the
authorities issued an Arabic-only educational policy which strictly prohibited teachers and
educational officials from using any language other than Arabic in formal communication
in educational institutions (with the exception of foreign language classes). In an even more
extreme move, the government issued a law in 2001 prohibiting people from naming their
newborn babies with non-Arabic names, after a significant rise in a trend among Berber
speakers of using Berber names for their children. Although the wording of these policies
and laws did not explicitly refer to the Berber language, it was commonly understood that
the reason for the introduction of this policy was to disseminate and enforce the use of
Arabic in Berber-speaking areas. The Libyan regimes exclusion of the Berber language
from public life was part of a broader authoritarian strategy of achieving national unity
through the strict imposition of a one-language-one-nation ideology.
The research presented in this paper describes the influence of these ideologies and
policies on day-to-day communication in the classroom in the town of Nalut which is
considered to be the second largest Berber town in Libya. We begin this paper by providing
a brief background to the Berber-speaking community in Libya. The section that follows
draws primarily on Adel Askers own knowledge of this community and on his lived
experience as a Berber speaker, raised in this community. There is no available research
literature on multilingualism in this region of Libya.

Language practices and values among Berber speakers in Libya

Geography, demography and the history of local patterns of settlement are significant factors
in determining the extent to which Berber speakers use Arabic. As one travels from the
north-west to the south-west of Libya, the presence of Arabic speakers recedes gradually
from one neighbouring town or village to another and, consequently, bilingual interactions
are less frequently heard among Berber speakers in the south-west. In their daily interactions
in local life worlds, these Berber speakers make predominant use of Berber. If they use
Arabic, it is in response to the presence of Arabic speakers in different communicative
events or to the demands imposed by public institutions.
It is important to stress the fact that, even though Arabic is spoken out of necessity
by some people in Berber communities in towns such as Nalut, Arabic is not viewed in
a negative light by Berber speakers. In contrast, many Berber speakers in settings such
as these have come to have a high regard for Arabic and they endorse the values that are
commonly associated with possessing good Arabic skills. This is because, in addition to its
association with sacred ritual and religious observance, Arabic provides access to scarce
rewards in the professional domain as well as being a means of displaying the attainment
of a desired social status. While Berber is used in local life worlds, with close friends and
family members, Arabic has become a resource for participating in public institutional life.
However, there are institutional settings where the use of the Arabic language is closely
monitored. Take schools, for example, where teachers and school officials are required
to ensure the implementation of the Arabic-only policy within the school premises, and
especially within classrooms. In fact, the use of Modern Standard Arabic has long been
embedded within the schools in Berber areas in Libya, ever since the establishment of the
modern school system in the early 1950s. Before that, the only schools in the region were
faith schools in which the Quran, Hadith2 and Islamic Sharia law were taught. Classical

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Arabic and Libyan Arabic were the language varieties used for instruction. The Berber
language has, therefore, never been used in schools and there has been no tradition of
reading and writing in Berber. Arabic has become not only the official medium of education,
but also a key dimension of classroom practice, signifying classroom discipline and the
professionalism of teachers.
Multilingual classroom discourse: a critical, ethnographic perspective
In this paper, we draw on critical sociolinguistic and ethnographic research in which
language ideology is seen as an essential part of the social grounding of language use. In
this view, the language practices and language choices of individual speakers are shaped
by beliefs, commonsense notions and values related to particular languages in their social
world, and, cumulatively, over time, their language practices and choices contribute to
the reproduction of these beliefs, values and commonsense understanding (Blackledge
2008; Gal and Woolard 2001; Heller 1999; Woolard 1998). In multilingual communities
where language ideologies are most visible, some languages come to be seen as having
greater value than others. In Bourdieus (1991) terms, they come to be seen as a legitimate
languages, particularly in institutional settings such as schools. Drawing on this concept
from the work of Bourdieu, Heller and Martin-Jones (2001, 2) argue that key questions
to address in school-based research include: what ways of using language, what kinds of
language practices are valued and considered good, normal, appropriate, or correct in the
framework of ideological orientations connected to social, economic, and political interests.
In research on education in multilingual contexts, there has been an enduring concern with the interactional and ideological processes involved in the construction of
legitimate language (e.g. Heller 1999; Jaffe 1999; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001; Lin
and Martin 2005; Saxena 2009; Blackledge and Creese 2010; Cincotta-Segi 2011;
Chimbutane 2011). Researchers have traced the ways in which language ideologies
circulate within broader socio-cultural and socio-political arenas and they have examined how such ideologies are reproduced and/or contested within the daily interactional
routines of classrooms. They have also revealed the specific, situated ways in which
teachers instructional discourse is shaped by explicit (de jure) or implicit (de facto)
language policies.
As shown by Moore (1999) and by Canagarajah (2001), there are often discontinuities
between students home- and community-based discourses and the discourses about language that they encounter in their classrooms. Individual students have to navigate these
discontinuities. Moreover, language ideologies may function as a hidden curriculum and
classroom discourse practices can convey deeper messages about how the world operates, about what kind of knowledge is socially valued, and who may speak and in what
manner (Mertz 1998). However, dominant language ideologies are not reproduced uniformly across teaching/learning contexts and teachers assume different stances vis-a-vis
official language policies. The processes involved in the translation of policy on paper
into classroom practices are highly situated. As Creese and Leung (2003) point out, teachers respond to language policies within an interactive frame which includes their own
interpretation of policy imperatives and their own knowledge of and affiliation to local
communities of practice. Hornberger and Johnson (2007, 510511) argue that we need
to investigate the specific ways in which the processes of language policy and planning
are played out in different multilingual settings and show how they create or restrict
ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual pedagogies. In this same vein,
Creese (2005) and Menken and Garca (2010) note that, because language policies often

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create circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do is

limited, teachers and students resort to a range of creative strategies for dealing with these
constraints.
The study
We turn now to the classrooms in Nalut, in the west of Libya, where Adel Asker carried
out ethnographic fieldwork over the whole of the school year in 2009. His focus was on
two secondary school English classes in a school where English was taught as a speciality
subject. The wider study from which this data is drawn was investigating the links between
the students motivation to learn English and their daily classroom learning experience.
This paper is based on field notes made during daily observations of the two classrooms
over a four month period and on audio-recordings of particular moments of multilingual
classroom interactions (Berber/Arabic/English). The data extracts discussed below reveal
the subtle and complex nature of the multilingual interactions within different participant structures in these classrooms and they show the different ways in which individual
teachers and students drew on the linguistic resources available to them and the specific
manner in which their discourse practices were indexically oriented to wider language
ideologies.
The data presented here was gathered with two student participants and two teachers
based in two different classrooms. As well as audio-recordings and field notes, the data
also includes consecutive ethnographic interviews with the participants. These interviews
were conducted in Berber and explored the participants attitudes towards language use and
documented their accounts of the language choices they made in the classroom. Our analysis
focuses on the ways in which the multilingual practices, captured in audio-recordings of
particular episodes, indexed wider language ideologies and policies. Since these were
English language classes, this included the enduring ideologies regarding the sole use of
the target language in the classroom.
Navigating language policies and dominant language ideologies: multilingual
resources in classroom interactions
Since the two classrooms in the school in this study were in Nalut, in the heart of the Berberspeaking region in Libya, all the students and teachers spoke Berber as their first language
and Arabic as a second language. The students were learning English as a foreign language.
In the English classes discussed here, the teachers frequently switched between Arabic and
English, but they never switched into Berber. During the four months of fieldwork, Adel
Asker identified the following recurring patterns of language choice in these classrooms:
for the most part, the teachers used English to read from the textbook or from the board
and to give basic organizational instructions. They then switched to Arabic when they
needed to explain something, to provide explicit comments on the structure of English,
to translate individual words and sentences, to guide students and to navigate between
activities or to convey other formal and casual messages. The teachers put a great deal of
emphasis on explicit and accurate explanation of English language structures and accurate
Arabic translation of English texts. They followed a largely traditional approach to language
teaching and teachers instructional discourse dominated the interactions. The teacher-led
nature of the talk in Arabic limited the extent to which the students were exposed to English
and created very few opportunities for meaningful interaction or for spontaneous student
contributions to classroom conversations.

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The predominant use of Arabic was partly due to the teachers lack of confidence in their
own abilities in spoken English and partly due to their concern about observing school and
national policy regarding the official medium of instruction. In contrast, the students moved
in and out of Arabic, Berber and English. They used English and Arabic when they were
required to do so and when they were going along with the teachers agenda. However, they
used Berber when speaking to each other and when they wanted to signal disengagement
with the lesson or to mount small challenges to teacher authority. This contrast between the
multilingual-discourse practices of the teachers and the students indexed different language
ideologies regarding the use of Arabic and of Berber in the school context, as we will show
in the sections that follow.

Upholding the Arabic-only policy in whole-class interactions

Some teachers in the school in the wider study (even English teachers) showed a particularly
strong commitment to the Arabic-only policy and reacted negatively to the students use
of Berber in whole-class interactions. For instance, Hanna,3 the grammar teacher, who
had six years of teaching experience, appeared to exercise what can only be described as
language policing (cf. Blommaert 2009). She repeatedly asked her students to switch to
English or Arabic when they initiated talk in Berber in whole-class interactions or when
they responded in Berber to her questions or prompts. In Extract #1 below, we see Hannas
reaction to the use of Berber by one of her students. In this extract, Hanna is initiating a
warm-up activity by inviting the students to talk about social gatherings (the transcription
conventions for this and other extracts are set out in the Endnotes4).
Extract 1:
1
2
3
4
5

T: where do we meet new friends?

S1: birthday parties?
T: yes, birthday parties, or. . . .?
S2: <B>
[<B> weddings]
T: in English

6
7

S2: <A>
T: in Arabic. . .

8
9

S2: <A>
[<A> weddings]
T: in weddings, yes, or. . .. where else do you meet new friends?

[<A>I do not know what it is in English]

Here, one student (S2) used Berber (line 4) to answer Hannas question. Hanna responded
by asking the student to use the English equivalent (line 5), but the student said (in Arabic)
that she did not know the English word (line 6). This prompted Hanna to insist (line 7) that
at least the Arabic equivalent of the word should be provided. Her insistence on the use
of the Arabic word indexed her commitment to classroom observance of the Arabic-only
policy, despite the fact that Berber was a language that she shared with the students and
despite the fact that either Berber or Arabic could have served the same communicative
purpose at that moment in the lesson (i.e. that of helping the student to fill a lexical gap).
Hanna engaged in language policing in different ways. One other strategy she employed was that of recasting the students utterances and replacing Berber words with
Arabic words as shown in Extract #2 below. Here, the students were studying the function
of modal verbs. They were learning how to make requests in English, drawing on examples
from the textbook.

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A. Asker and M. Martin-Jones

Extract 2:
1
2
3
4

F: Amal, may I use your laptop?

T: Fadiya, what are you asking for here?
F: use the laptop
T: yes, but what is the function of may here?

F: <E> may <A> . . .

case asks for <B>permission]

T: <A>

7
8

F: <A>
(repeats) [<A> asks for permission]
T: it asks for permission

<B>

[<A>asks for permission]

In the multilingual interaction above, Hanna recast in Arabic (

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[<E> may <A>in this

[le n]) (line 6) the

[ i:r t]) given by the student (Fadiya) in (line 5).5 Fadiya

keyword in Berber (
merely took up the Arabic version provided (line 7) and then Hanna repeated the utterance
in English (line 8). Here, Hanna merely models the legitimate language of the lesson
rather than making a meta-comment as in Extract #1. Here again, we see that both Berber
and Arabic could have served the same purpose, that of enabling the student to show
understanding despite the fact that she had a lexical gap.
In an interview conducted later, Hanna made an unexpected revelation when Adel Asker
asked her what she thought about students speaking Berber in her classes.
Extract #3:
As you see yourself, students do not show respect to anyone. It is difficult to control their language
and you waste half of the class watching their language. The classroom is not a classroom if students
are talking to me in Berber. I do not insist that they use English all the time because I know it is
difficult and unrealistic but there is no excuse for them to use Berber in the classroom. (Interview
with Hanna in Berber, October 2009)

During this interview, Hanna began by referring to the students use of Berber in her
classes as disrespectful. In addition, she represented the speaking of Berber as a threat
to her professionalism as a teacher, saying: The classroom is not a classroom if students
are talking to me in Berber. When asked about her reliance on Arabic in her class, she
attributed this to the difficulty of communicating solely in English. In this interview, which
was actually carried out in Berber, and in her contribution to interactions in her classroom,
Hanna clearly revealed her views about what languages she deemed to be ideologically
appropriate in the secondary English classroom. In her class, the balance was tilted more
towards constructing a legitimate language than providing opportunities for learners to
draw on their strongest language resources in classroom conversations with her.
Relaxing the Arabic-only policy in whole-class interactions
Unlike Hanna, another English teacher, referred to here as Wafa, did not always require
her students to switch to Arabic when they addressed her in Berber. She thus allowed the
communicative practices in her classes to be fluid and multilingual and, at the same time, she
built on her understanding of the students Berber utterances to facilitate communicative
interaction. Extract #4 below illustrates the fluid multilingual pedagogy that characterised
her classes. This particular exchange took place while the students were doing group work,
discussing the concept of myth. After this they went on to work on the main reading text
for the lesson which was based on a myth:

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Extract 4:
1
2
3

S1: <B>
S2: <E> myth <B>
imaginary]

S1: <B>

S2 <B>
<B> is like. . .]

<E> myth? [<B> what is the meaning of <E>myth?]

[<E>myth <B>means something
[<B> something like Aliens?]
. . ... [<B> no, aliens are science fiction, <E> myth

S3: <B>

[<B> like the raven]

T: <A>
morning raven?]

(teacher joins S1, S2, and S3s interaction ([<A> what about a

8
9
10
11
12

S3: <B>
[<B> if the first thing you see in the
morning is a raven, your day is ruined]
T: yes, this could be a good example. So we can describe a myth as. . .
S2: an old story
T: yes, an old story that is passed down from one generation to another

Student S1 was discussing the concept of myth in Berber when Wafa overheard their
conversation and joined in the interaction (line 7). She asked one of the students (S3) to
elaborate on how ravens were related to the concept of myth. Her intervention was made in
Arabic. The student continued in Berber and gave an example of a myth in a louder voice
and, following her example, Wafa also raised her voice to address the whole class and share
the example with them. She did this in English (lines 10 and 12).
Although Wafas pragmatic approach to language policy implementation in her class
may not have been motivated by an understanding of the potential of Berber for the development of meaningful communicative practice, one of the consequences of her approach was
the opening up of more opportunities for genuine teacherstudent dialogue. Her tolerant
attitude towards the use of Berber in her classes was clearly expressed in the following
interview extract. She was responding to Adel Askers questions about the students use of
Berber in her classes.
Extract #5:
There is nothing you can do about it. You have two options: either you spend the whole class telling
the students off for speaking Berber or ignore it and get on with your lesson. In my first years of
teaching, I started every New Year telling myself that I would not let the students speak Berber but
that turned out to be impossible. The thing is that many students stop engaging with the class when I
insist on speaking only Arabic or English and that has made me decide that speaking Berber is better
than silence and disengagement. (Interview with Wafa in Berber, November 2009)

Wafa never spoke Berber herself during all the classroom observations carried out by Adel
Asker, but her account above and her actual classroom practice revealed her tolerant attitude
towards the students use of Berber.
Student group work: a space for the use of Berber
While the two teachers contrasted in their reactions to the students use of Berber in
whole-class interactions, neither of them attempted to prohibit the students from using
it in when they interacted with their peers. Moreover, the fact that all students shared a
double study desk with one of their peers meant that they were continuously engaged in

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A. Asker and M. Martin-Jones

on-task and off-task interactions. As we will see in the sections below, even when the
students were on-task, they drew on all the linguistic resources available to them (Berber,
Arabic and English) to clarify and correct each others use of English, and to explain
and translate structures and utterances in the textbook that they did not comprehend. The
codeswitching that they engaged in during peer interactions was shaped by the demands of
the communicative situation and by their own language capabilities. In fact, the teachers
paid little attention to these off-stage interactions between students. What really counted
was being able to provide convincing on-stage performances during whole-class, teacherled interactions. It was during these on-stage interactional sequences, which typically
followed the initiationresponse(feedback) pattern, that dominant ideologies about the
use of Arabic or English surfaced most often.

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Switching languages, managing relationships

When this study was carried out, most students at the secondary school level in Libya
were expected to be able to communicate in Arabic because, at this stage, they had spent a
minimum of nine years using Arabic as the main medium of instruction. All the students in
the two classrooms discussed here appeared to speak Arabic, but with varying degrees of
competence and fluency. Those students with less competence in Arabic were sometimes
subjected to mocking by their peers when they uttered unusual Arabic phrases and this meant
that they showed considerable reluctance to speak in Arabic. However, secondary school
teachers, such as the ones in this study, did not express much sympathy with those students
who claimed that they were not confident in speaking Arabic. The commonsense view,
that is, speaking Berber reflected ill-disciplined and challenging behaviour, was widely
articulated by teachers, such as Hanna.
This commonsense view was also expressed by some students and guided their communicative practices in the classroom. Take, for example, the case of one of the students from
the school in this study. Hajer was an outstanding third-year student who strived to earn top
grades and outperform her peers. She had been top of her year group in her first and second
year in the current school. She was 17 years old at the time when Adel Askers fieldwork
was carried out. Hajer was described by her teachers as clever, motivated, hard working and
a responsible student. She was also a class leader who often spoke on behalf of her peers,
inside and outside the classroom, relying on her good social and communication skills. She
spoke Berber and Arabic with ease and fluency. She could also read and write English with
ease and fluency, but her abilities in spoken English were less developed. As she pointed
out in her interview, she rarely spoke English in the class and these were occasions when
she was participating in classroom tasks focused on the textbook.
Hajer was one of the few students in her class who never attempted to address the
teachers in Berber. At the same time, she used Berber consistently when she interacted
with her peers. Extract #6 below shows how Hajer moved in and out of Berber, Arabic and
English as she was engaged in a task with her desk partner (Sarah). On this occasion, they
were discussing the meaning of the verb try which occurred in a reading passage that they
were reading silently.
Extract 6:
1
2

S: <E> The case was tried (reading from the textbook) <B>
[<B>I cannot understand it]

H: <B>

(turns to the teacher)

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Language and Education

351

<A>
[<B> Because you thought <E> tried <B> means
attempted.<A> Teacher, <E> tried <A> does not mean attempted here, does it?]

T: <E> no, it means <A>

6
7
8

S: <B>
intended meaning?]
H: <B>

teacher) <A>
[<B>Try to focus on the
context and guess the meaning. <A> the context is the key to understanding. Right, teacher?]

[<A> tries, a legal term]

[<B> how do I know which is the
(turns to the

We can see how Hajer responded to Sarah in Berber (line 3) in order to try to explain to
her the specialist, legal use of the term tried. She then turned to the teacher (line 4) and
asked her in Arabic to validate her explanation. The same pattern of interlocutor-related
language choice continued throughout the interaction. Hajer was consistent in addressing
her peer in Berber and her teacher in Arabic. From her interviews with Adel Asker, it was
clear that Hajer thrived in the institutional context of the school and had also embraced
its dominant language ideology: she saw no official role for Berber in the main on-stage
spaces of the classroom. In the following interview extract, she made explicit her views
about her language use in the classroom.
Extract #7:
I think it is disrespectful to talk to your teacher in Berber and also damaging to your image as a
student. Its bad enough that we do not speak enough English in the classroom and the class
sometimes becomes anything but a class when everyone is speaking in Berber. (Interview with
Hajer in Berber, December 2009)

While she made concerted efforts to maintain her image as an ideal student by always
addressing her English teachers in Arabic and English, she never used these languages with
her peers. She was equally keen to remain socially accepted by her peers. Addressing them
in Arabic or English would have been seen as showing off. To express solidarity with them,
she used Berber. Hajer clearly employed her language resources in order to negotiate and
build different relationships and to position herself in different ways within the complex
communicative spaces of the language classroom.

Switching languages, engaging and disengaging with learning and with teacher
authority
For those students who wanted to express dissatisfaction or frustration, speaking Berber
served as a key communicative resource. Nada was one such student. Although Nada was
considered to be one of the top students in her class, she often engaged in challenging and
disruptive behaviour. Like Hajer, Nada spoke Berber at home and in her local neighbourhood
and was fluent in spoken Arabic. However, her English-speaking skills were still developing.
Describing the sound of English as music to her ears, Nada indicated, in one of her
interviews with Adel Asker, that she had chosen to become an English-major student
because she was motivated by the desire to become a fluent speaker of English. However,
early on in these interviews, Nada had expressed her frustration with the level of spoken
English that she had attained after spending almost three years in the current school. She
had described her learning experience as a waste of three years. At the same time, her
desire to become a fluent speaker of English was not part of a wider career-oriented strategy.

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She consistently maintained that her main aim was just to speak English and she would
think about a future career at a later stage.
Adel Askers field notes from his classroom observations revealed that Nadas disruptive behaviour involved practices like being argumentative with the teachers, making
unnecessary comments at inappropriate times, resisting her teachers authority, and sometimes withdrawing completely from engagement with learning and refusing to participate
in any activity. Among these aspects of challenging behaviour, observed by Adel Asker,
was Nadas frequent use of Berber in addressing her teachers. In Extract #8 below, we see
her switching from Arabic to Berber and vice versa. The teacher has just asked the whole
class to think of local examples of body language:

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Extract 8:
1
2

T: can you think of an example of a local body language sign we use?

N: thumbs up.

3
4
5

T: yes, this is an example of body language <A>

[<A> Can you think of a sign more local to our culture]
[<B> what do you mean by local,
N: <B>
teacher? Dont we all use the thumbs-up sign?]

6
7
8
9

T: yes we do <A>
a sign that is specific to us as Libyans]
[<B> there are many]
N: <B>
T: can you tell one?

10
11

N: <A>
We say I do not know]

[<A> but I meant

[<A> like shrugging shoulders when

In this extract, Nada challenged the feedback she received from her teacher by insisting
that the thumbs-up sign was an example of local body language. In the original Berber
utterance, her wording was particularly challenging. Moreover, this challenge was made
in a context where students rarely challenged teacher authority. The teacher dealt with
this by agreeing but also asking for an example that could be distinctly Libyan. For this
teacher, local culture meant national culture and her use of Arabic could be interpreted
as a means of indexing this national culture. As we see in this extract, Nada switched to
Berber twice: once in her second turn at talk (line 5) when she argued that the thumbs-up
sign was an instance of local body language and once again in her third turn at talk, to
indicate that she knew the answer. When the teacher asked her to elaborate, she switched
back to Arabic in her final turn to refer to another example of local body language and to
illustrate when it is used. In other similar interactions with her teachers observed by Adel
Asker, Nada tended to switch to Arabic when she was positively engaged with an activity
or when a teacher paid attention to what she said and appeared to value it, whereas she
tended to switch to Berber as she withdrew from constructive engagement with an activity.
Concluding comments
In this paper, we have considered some of the ways in which teachers and students in an
English language specialist school in Libya, in 2009, were navigating national-languagein-education policies, along with the ideologies about Berber, Arabic and English that were
circulating at the time. With reference to interviews, audio-recordings and observations
of classroom talk, we have provided some insights into the ways in which these ideologies and commonsense understandings of language shaped some of the daily rounds of

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353

communicative life in English lessons and we have shown some of the ways in which these
ideologies and understandings were articulated in the teachers and students own accounts.
Earlier critical, interpretive and ethnographic research in classrooms in other postcolonial settings (e.g. Arthur 2001; Lin and Martin 2005; Saxena 2009; Cincotta-Segi 2011;
Chimbutane 2011) has shown that the impact of language ideologies and language policies
is keenly felt in public schools because of the way in which they operate as institutions linked
to the nation-state and as spaces where national, official language policies are accorded
legitimacy and authority. During the years when the Gaddafi regime held sway in Libya,
a particularly authoritarian strategy for achieving national unity was imposed through the
Arabic-only policy in education. In English classes, this was coupled with a preoccupation
with the use of the target language in the classroom.
The teachers and students in the classes in this study were clearly constrained by the
wider institutional and ideological context in which they were working. However, in the
brief classroom conversations and in the interview extracts we have examined here, we see
that the teachers and students were responding in different ways to these constraints, as
active and artful social actors. In particular, we see teacher and student agency at work in
the extracts of classroom talk, reminding us that the imposition of power and of legitimate
language has to be interactionally accomplished and is therefore always open to challenge.
Both of the teachers overlooked the students use of Berber both in their off-stage group
work and in discussions with their peers. However, in the whole-class interactions, the two
teachers reacted in different ways to on-stage use of Berber, with one teacher upholding
the Arabic-only policy and with the other teacher taking a more relaxed approach and, at
the same time, facilitating interactions and constructing a fluid, multilingual pedagogy. The
two students also differed in their responses to the regimes of language (Kroskrity 2000)
in the classes in which they found themselves. Hajer showed an ideological affiliation to
her teachers views regarding the use of Berber in the classroom and colluded with her
teachers agenda while, at the same time, drawing on Berber in communicating with her
classmates and building a relationship with them. In contrast, Nada engaged in small acts
of resistance or disengaged from the learning process altogether. Her challenges to teacher
authority were indexed through her use of Berber. Both students brought Berber, the spoken
language of their local life worlds, into the institutional spaces of the school and into the
English classroom, albeit in different ways and with different purposes.
As McCarty (2011, 17) puts it, a critical ethnographic approach gives us a view into
LPP [language planning and policy] processes in fine detail up close and in practice.
When combined with analysis of multilingual-classroom-discourse practices, it can also
illuminate the daily consequences of language policies for those most closely involved. The
recent political transformation of Libya has opened up opportunities for the development
of research of this kind. Ethnography requires extended fieldwork and engagement with
research participants, so it allows researchers to engage in critical dialogue with teachers
and students as the research unfolds. In this north-west region of Libya, it would allow researchers to build a sound understanding of the ways in which students language resources
are used inside and outside the classroom and to contribute this knowledge to future debates
about the respective roles of Berber, Arabic and English in education.
Notes
1. For an account of policy vis-a-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.

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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
NORMAL Roman font
BOLD Arabic font
NORMAL Arabic font (non-bold)

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Symbols
<>
<A>
<B>
<E>
()
...
Full stop
Question mark

Translation of Arabic or/and Berber into English

Transcription for English utterances
Transcription for Arabic utterances
Transcription of Berber utterances

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

Marks the beginning of an utterance in Arabic
Marks the beginning of an utterance in Berber
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.
Used after words spoken with falling intonation
Rising intonation

Participants
S1, S2 (etc.)
Students identified, but not by name
T
Teacher
5. The mixed BerberArabic utterance should be read from the right to left, following the conventions of the Arabic writing system.

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