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Fez- The 32nd issue of the international journal “Languages and Linguistics” has just been released on the theme of "Language, Culture and Education: A Critical Perspective."
Edited by Professor Moha Ennaji (International Institute for Languages and Cultures, Fez), this issue includes a set of scholarly articles motivated by the growing interest in applied linguistics. The studies included in this collection explore the relationship between language, culture, and education from a critical perspective.
Five articles, one in Arabic and four in English, deal with the impact of language and language policy on the symbolic cultural market and the development of language teaching. The analysis in each article is either linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, or based on qualitative fieldwork.
In the first article, "Ideological Perspectives in Language Policy: Framing Nashville English-only Debate", Mohammed Albakry and Nancy Warden (Middle Tennessee State University) bring to the fore the 2009 language debate in Tennessee, as voters rejected a proposed English-only amendment to the charter of Nashville. Based on opinion articles and letters to the editor, the survey discusses the dominant ideological debate between the opponents and the proponents of the English-only restriction. The authors argue that the findings have ramifications for language identity, language policy, education, and immigrants’ integration.
In the second article, “Multicultural Literacy: Using National Metaphors as a Culture Learning Strategy for “Third Culture Kids””, Janie Hubbard and Nieke Coppelmans (University of Alabama) illustrate how the use of metaphors in the classroom as a culture learning strategy can help learners of English as a foreign/second language to acquire the target language skills and compare cultures.
Based on fieldwork and a case study, the article reveals that this strategy contributes to the promotion of multicultural literacy development among culturally and linguistically diverse students; it also leads to the improvement of classroom activities in the domain of multicultural literacy.
In the third article, Charles Owu-Ewie (Winneba University) addresses the issue of “The Language Policy of Education in Ghana in Perspective: The Past, the Present, and the Future.” The author argues that the stable use of the mother tongue as a means of instruction in primary education and as a subject in pre-tertiary institutions in Ghana will depend on reframing the language policy in education, and on strong governmental support and change of attitude.
In the fourth article, "Amazigh Language in the Maghreb ", Ennaji examines the status of Berber in the aftermath of its official recognition thanks to the militancy of the Amazigh cultural movement and the political will to integrate Amazigh into the educational establishment. The author shows the extent to which its introduction in schools will contribute to favorable attitudes toward it and to more standardization and codification of the Amazigh language.
In the fifth article, "L’Impéritie de la Lexicographie Arabe Face à l’Expansion Néologique des Langues de Créativité Scientifique", Abderrezak Dourari (University of Algiers) presents a critical perspective of the Arabic lexicography and its weak creativity in the domain of science, particularly social sciences.
The author describes how factors like salafism, nationalism, traditional cultural norms, lack of critical thinking, and absence of creative modern strategies in academic writings in Algeria and other Arab countries have contributed to the stagnation of the Arabic lexicon (and scientific research, generally) in this part of the world.
Finally, in his Arabic article, Abdessamad Rouai (Chaouaib Doukkali University, Eljadida) looks at the syntactic structure of adverbs in Modern Standard Arabic in a comparative perspective. He develops an analysis of Arabic adverbs within the minimalist framework of Chomsky.
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