English Studies

Post-colonial Moroccan cinema is relatively young as far as the number of productions is concerned. There are a handful of movies which have made it to the international scene, many of which have managed to do so because they tackled issues that can be considered taboo in Moroccan (and also Arab and Muslim societies). Leila Marrakshi's Marock and to a lesser extent Farida Benlyazid Keed Ensa (Women's wile) and Bab Sama Maftouh(Gateway to Heaven)  are examples of such movies.

When Paul Bowles settled in the International zone of Tangier after WWII, he took up a project of translating a group of young and poor uneducated oral storytellers from Tangier (Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi, Ahmed Yacoubi, and Abdesslam Boulaich). In his translation and writings about Morocco, Paul Bowles concentrated on two main features of the culture, mainly the popular and the oral. Accordingly, aim of this paper is to reveal the motivations behind Bowles's reductionist approach in his representation of Morocco through his translations of Moroccan oral tradition. The paper also aims to demonstrate how Orientalism characterizes Bowles's translations in its two main definitions; both as a reductionist form of representation and as a form of knowledge/ Power. The main argument is that in his concentration on only popular culture and the illiterate class of society in his representation of the culture, Bowles transmitted to the West a fragmented and incomplete image about the " other. " Therefore, this paper comes to the conclusion that like most orientalist writings, Bowles's translations and writings about Morocco serve in reinforcing biased stereotypes about the East.

Since the Cultural and Social turns in Translation Studies, strong light has been shed on the critical role that the socio-cultural context of reception plays in the selection of a particular culture, author or a text for translation. As Carbonell (1996) argues, the motivation behind approaching and translating a text stems from the context where this text is going to be read and interpreted. Starting from this assumption, this paper places Paul Bowles’s translations of the oral stories of Tangier in the context of the American counter culture post World War II. The objective is to analyze the ways in which the interest and the expectations of the receiving culture during this period have conditioned Bowles’s selection and translation of the oral stories of Tangier.  Being determined by the socio-cultural context and the expectations of the “Other”, the author argues  that the translations of the oral stories of Tangier were read and interpreted in line with the reality of the “Other”, that is resistance in the context of the American counter-culture instead of resistance at home/ post-colonial Morocco. The paper concludes that translation in such contexts is a form of manipulation, for the intentions of the author and the translator are not the same. Therefore, meaning is “lost” as the text quits its original context of production (postcolonial Morocco) and becomes a novel about the “Other”.

Key words:  American counter-culture, oral stories of Tangier, Paul Bowles, translation

When Paul Bowles settled in the International zone of Tangier after WWII, he took up a project of translating a group of young and poor uneducated oral storytellers from Tangier (Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi, Ahmed Yacoubi, and Abdesslam Boulaich). In his translation and writings about Morocco, Paul Bowles concentrated on two main features of the culture, mainly the popular and the oral. Accordingly, aim of this paper is to reveal the motivations behind Bowles’s reductionist approach in his representation of Morocco through his translations of Moroccan oral tradition. The paper also aims to demonstrate how Orientalism characterizes Bowles’s translations in its two main definitions; both as a reductionist form of representation and as a form of knowledge/ Power. The main argument is that in his concentration on only popular culture and the illiterate class of society in his representation of the culture, Bowles transmitted to the West a fragmented and incomplete image about the “ot...

This paper is an exploratory qualitative study of the acquisition of Moroccan Arabic by four
illegal transit migrants in Rabat. These migrants come from Senegal, Congo, Cameroon and
Ghana. They speak different mother tongues but three of them speak French as a second
language while the Ghanaian speaks English. The paper tries to focus on the micro level of
individual experiences as well as on the meso level of migrant organizations and the macro level
of language ideologies. The informants have been found to draw on various linguistic and nonlinguistic
resources to achieve understanding of the multilingual sociolinguistic situation of the
host society and to try to establish communication with its members.

Recently, there has been a significant surge in the number of sub-Saharans who were forced to extend their stay in Morocco. This exploratory research is, to my knowledge, a first sociolinguistic attempt to shed light on African immigrants in Morocco.

A Multidisciplinary Framework developed by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) is adopted for this study, where four male sub-Saharan immigrants who speak a different native language each (Wolof, Bamum, Lingala, and Akan) are interviewed in order to answer two research questions.

The first question aims to investigate the interviewees’ learning of Moroccan Arabic, tracing the possibility of an emerging Moroccan Pidgin Arabic in light of the sometimes-noticed social divide between this minority and the local community.

The second research question seeks to explore the participants’ sense of identity as shaped by, and shaping, their (non-) integration within the new environment. Where the question of Second Language Acquisition is at the base (micro) level of the tripartite theoretical framework, identity is a component of the model’s meso level.

It has been found that the interviewed immigrants’ socioeconomic status largely determines the quality and quantity of contact they entertain with the dominant speech community.

In turn, the nature of such interactions correlates with the degree of the participants’ investment in learning the local variety. Sub-Saharans who lead a less stable socioeconomic life are more likely to acquire content words.

For instance, the participant who has stayed the longest (eighteen years by the time the interview was conducted) was in daily contact with native Moroccan Arabic speakers, but he produced a deviant variety which can be better described as Moroccan Pidgin.

Apparently, identity is also affected by the same factors. More socially stable sub-Saharan immigrants assume more self-aware agency in negotiating their identity as learners of a foreign language.

Aphra Behn is one of many a woman writer who was both overlooked and discredited by history. Her literary works were prominent back in the late 17th century because they were thought of as "scandalous". Although not much information is known about her real birth name, origins or life story, several intellectuals, especially feminist historians and literary critics, have attempted to shed light on Aphra Behn as a remarkable woman writer and literary figure that slowly but surely marked English literary history long before Jane Austen. For instance, Virginia Woolf exalts her in A Room of One's Own (1929) by saying "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds". Keywords— English Literature, Women Writers, Novel, Fiction, Literary Heritage.

There is little doubt that language and its politics are one of the most powerful apparati that construct, determine and communicate dynamic meanings about gender. The cultural and societal definitions of femininity and masculinity along with their connotations are reinforced and channeled through as well as constituted by language. In this regard, the notion of violence is a pertinent field wherein language, with its sexed and gendered lot, continues to perform and display aggressive and crude sexist meanings that debase a specific gender against the backdrop of another.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar are taking the lead in the urbanization boom that is drastically transforming the spatial fabric of the Arab Gulf region. Embedded in the ambitious urban development projects launched by the UAE and Qatar is an endeavour to ‘bring the world to the Arab Gulf region’. To this end, these two states are engaged in a process of collecting and borrowing antique objects and canonized artefacts, as well as reproducing and duplicating some internationally celebrated architectural sites and spaces. While some consider these projects to be ‘part of strategies to prepare for the post-oil era’, others hold that ‘Arab Gulf States aim to strengthen or … creatively (re)construct identitarian patterns’.1 It can be argued that Arab Gulf cities should be looked at as ‘political actors’ due to ‘the functions they fulfill as spatial command posts for globalized capitalism’.2 The production and organization of social space, in this sense, cannot be seen as a ‘dead...

In present-day Morocco, animal sacrifice still plays a major role in the lives of many people, inasmuch as the social character of everyday life possesses, as an important aspect, the religious one. In the context at hand, animal sacrifices take place on more than one occasion, and contain underneath their layers a miscellaneous battery of beliefs whose origins are historically and culturally dissimilar. However, sacrifice is an oft-marginalized practice that hardly occupies a focal position in scholarly research. This paper examines the sacrificial instances in Morocco, highlighting the reflectionist aspect of the practice. It studies the cultural and religious interactions that have engendered the sacrificial practice in its current form, and attempts to draw conclusions in relation to the Moroccan belief system and the social status quo. Next, it explores the position of the animal as a material as well as a symbolic entity within certain ceremonies that make use of sacrifices, and interprets it in terms of the ceremonies' dynamics and their spiritual and supernatural background. Reading sacrifice as a text, this paper also ventures to shed light on the position of the saint and the manner wherein he is represented in Morocco, in relation to the other sacred and omnipresent figure in the Moroccan context--Allah.

Morocco is a country whose political domain has for long been characterized by instability, corruption, and a lack of transparency.  Thus, it comes as no surprise that a number of movements, dissatisfied with the status quo, have attempted to change the Moroccan sociopolitical scene through protests and through a reinforcement of the people’s voice.  However, in the majority of cases, the regime outwits the protestors and succeeds in oppressing them both through the use of soft power and hard power, to extrapolate from Gramsci’s terms, reinforcing, thus, the people’s voicelessness.  This paper examines the current boycott that has influenced the Moroccan politico-socio-economic scene, reading it against a series of frustrations caused by the previous movements.  In so doing, this paper attempts to explore the ways wherein the movement has come to be an attempt at voicing, as well as a way of effacing from Moroccan memory the past experiences that, for the most part, forced the populace to voicelessness in the face of the Makhzen and its ruses.  This paper also examines the expansion of the movement to the cultural domain as it has come to boycott Mawazine, a move significant both for its representation of autonomy and for the incompatibility it had engendered.

The debate apropos of the quota system is a global debate that has been going on for decades, and that has led to unadulterated polarization of public opinion, and of academic stances more specifically. In Morocco, the introduction of gender quotas took place first unofficially in 2002, as part of an honorary agreement, and it was not until 2011, with the pressure of 20th February movement and of a plethora of women’s organizations—the feminist spring—that the quota system was legitimized. In the light of these political events, putting the quota system under scrutiny is crucial to the understanding of its impacts, both in terms of quantity and quality; this is made all the more indispensable in a country where, like many others, the world of politics is still heavily male-saturated. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of the quota system both globally and locally. It analyzes comparatively the representation of women and the effects the implementation of the gender quota system may have on women’s vision of the political field. Next, it ventures to shed light on the ways whereby the incorporation of women in politics is an empowering opportunity, as it allows for women to erase the stereotypical images of women as politically incapable. Finally, focus is constricted to the Moroccan case, where the impact of the gender quota system, as well as its function and changes, are put studied more closely.

Recent research on children's worlds has revealed how gender varies in salience across social contexts. Building on this observation, the author examines a highly salient gendered moment of group life among four-and five-year-old children at a youth soccer opening ceremony, where gender boundaries were activated and enforced in ways that constructed an apparently " natural " categorical difference between the girls and the boys. The author employs a multilevel analytical framework to explore (1) how children " do gender " at the level of interaction or performance, (2) how the structured gender regime constrains and enables the actions of children and parents, and (3) how children's gendered immersion in popular culture provides symbolic resources with which children and parents actively create (or disrupt) categorical differences. The article ends with a discussion of how gendered interactions, structure, and cultural meanings are intertwined, in both mutually reinforcing and contradictory ways.

The present study is motivated by the dearth of experimental research in the area of intercultural communicative competence. Theoretically, this particular area is gaining grounds, but practically it still needs further developments. In fact, this type of research has already been conducted by many researchers, but not all of the previous studies were experimental. Therefore, the aim of this action research is to attempt to incorporate ICC in teaching. To this end, the research question that pilots the study focused on the effect of training students on their critical cultural awareness. In an attempt to answer the research question, a prettest-posttest non-randomised control group was adopted. This research design is quasi-experimental since it does not involve any random assignment. The present study involved 45 common core students who belong to humanities stream. They were randomly divided into 2 groups. The first group (e.g., 22 students) were assigned to the control group; whereas, the second group (e.g., 23 students) were assigned to the experimental group. An independent samples t-test was run to check for any statistical significance. The t-test statistic revealed that the significance level is less than the p-value (t=-5.01, p< .05, df=43). Thus, it was concluded that there was a statistically significant difference between the control group and the experimental group. In the current study, among various suggestions, it is proposed that teachers should include intercultural communicative competence as an objective in their reading lesson plans.

Having a clear vocabulary profile of Moroccan master students might reveal where these participants stand compared to other countries. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the effect of languages of instruction in Morocco (e.g., Arabic vs. French) on the receptive vocabulary size of EFL Moroccan master students (e.g., departments of letters, science, and law). To this end, Meara's (2010) Yes/No test was used as an instrument to measure the overall vocabulary size of these participants. A total of 325 EFL master students took the aforementioned test. The main research question is: Does the medium of instruction have any effects on the receptive vocabulary size of these students? Descriptive statistics were employed to calculate the overall receptive vocabulary size of test-takers. It was found that Moroccan EFL master students have a total of (M= 2293) lemmas. An independent samples t-test was run to check for any statistical significance. The t-test statistic reveals that the significance level is less than the p-value (t=-4.068, p< .05, df= 323). Thus, it was concluded that there was a statistically significant difference between the French group and the Arabic group. The results of this study confirm that students who were instructed in French (M= 2417, sd= 903, N=185) outperformed the other students who were taught in Arabic (M= 2058, sd= 903, N= 140). In the current study, among various suggestions, it is proposed that the volume of 30 hours in the English module is not sufficient and should be complemented with vocabulary-based activities. Keywords: EFL Master Students, higher education instruction in Morocco, receptive vocabulary size, the medium of instruction and vocabulary size, vocabulary breadth studies Cite as: Agrram, A. (2020). Higher Education Languages of Instruction in Morocco and their impact on the Receptive Vocabulary Size of Moroccan EFL Master Students.