The sociolinguistic reality of Moroccan students through their representations of school languages

Abstract

It seems that the problem of language is one of the most complicated problems which pose a big challenge in the educational systems. The two frequent questions: Which language we study and which language we teach are very difficult to understand and to resolve because of the overlap between political and educational issues. This leads us to speak about language policy and language planning in education. So what is the significance of these concepts and how languages are planned in Morocco? And what are the outcomes? We will try to examine the problematic mentioned above by presenting a brief theoretical framework. With reference to the official documents, we will shed light on certain distortions that appear in the language policy dealt with in the educational system, and finally we will evaluate the outcomes of this policy based on the findings of an empirical research that we conducted during the university season: 2014 /2015. The nature of the research forced us to adopt the sociolinguistic approach. To collect data, we handed out questionnaires to 600 university students belonging to different Moroccan universities; the statistical analysis relied on SPSS program