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‘A classroom is not a classroom ifstudents are talking to me in Berber’:language ideologies and multilingualresources in secondary school Englishclasses in LibyaAdel Asker a & Marilyn Martin-Jones aa Mosaic Centre for Research in Multilingualism, School ofEducation , University of Birmingham , Edgbaston , Birmingham ,United KingdomPublished online: 20 May 2013.

To cite this article: Adel Asker & Marilyn Martin-Jones (2013) ‘A classroom is not a classroomif students are talking to me in Berber’: language ideologies and multilingual resourcesin 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, 2013Vol. 27, No. 4, 343–355, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2013.788189

‘A classroom is not a classroom if students are talking to mein Berber’: language ideologies and multilingual resourcesin 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

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

This paper reports on an ethnographic study carried out by Adel Asker in 2009, withteachers and learners, in English classes in a secondary school in the north-west ofLibya. Arabic is the official medium of instruction in all Libyan secondary schools, butmost teachers and students in this region are Berber speakers. Adel Asker’s aim wasto investigate the ways in which beliefs and ideologies about ‘appropriate’ languageuse, embedded in broader socio-cultural, political and historical contexts, were beingreproduced through multilingual classroom interaction and codeswitching practices, inlocal English classes. In this paper, we show how teachers and students’ own accounts oftheir multilingual practices revealed different beliefs and ideologies about the ‘appropri-acy’ 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 andArabic, employing the contrast between these languages as a communicative resourceand as a means of indexing wider cultural values. We demonstrate how they did this inwhole-class teacher–student interactions and in student–student interactions, in situatednegotiation of language learner identities, sometimes colluding with and sometimescontesting 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 minoritygroup, which represents between 10% and 15% of the population of Libya, speak Berberand Arabic. Although Arabic arrived in North Africa fourteen centuries ago, the strongassociation between Arabic and Islam has allowed Arabic to continue to dominate thelinguistic landscape of the region. In modern history, the dominance of Arabic has beenmade even greater by government policies and constitutional arrangements in differentnation states in the region. In Libya, only Arabic was recognized as the language of thenation on Independence from the Italian colonizers in 1952. The Berber language (alsoknown as Tamazight) is the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Libya. It is theonly other local language spoken in Libya, alongside Arabic. Berber-speaking people livein towns and villages that are concentrated in the north-west of Libya along the Nafosamountain range which extends from the south of Tripoli towards the south-west.

Under the Gaddafi regime, Libya remained the only North African country with aBerber population which not only refused to recognize the Berber language, but alsorefused 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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fact, the former government’s attitude towards languages other than Arabic was so extremethat it prohibited the display of non-Arabic writing systems in public spaces such as roadsigns, advertisement billboards, or commercial units such as shops. In the mid-1970s, theauthorities issued an Arabic-only educational policy which strictly prohibited teachers andeducational officials from using any language other than Arabic in formal communicationin educational institutions (with the exception of foreign language classes). In an even moreextreme move, the government issued a law in 2001 prohibiting people from naming theirnewborn babies with ‘non-Arabic names’, after a significant rise in a trend among Berberspeakers of using Berber names for their children. Although the wording of these policiesand laws did not explicitly refer to the Berber language, it was commonly understood thatthe reason for the introduction of this policy was to disseminate and enforce the use ofArabic in Berber-speaking areas. The Libyan regime’s exclusion of the Berber languagefrom 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 andpolicies on day-to-day communication in the classroom in the town of Nalut which isconsidered to be the second largest Berber town in Libya. We begin this paper by providinga brief background to the Berber-speaking community in Libya. The section that followsdraws primarily on Adel Asker’s own knowledge of this community and on his livedexperience as a Berber speaker, raised in this community. There is no available researchliterature 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 factorsin determining the extent to which Berber speakers use Arabic. As one travels from thenorth-west to the south-west of Libya, the presence of Arabic speakers recedes graduallyfrom one neighbouring town or village to another and, consequently, bilingual interactionsare less frequently heard among Berber speakers in the south-west. In their daily interactionsin local life worlds, these Berber speakers make predominant use of Berber. If they useArabic, it is in response to the presence of Arabic speakers in different communicativeevents or to the demands imposed by public institutions.

It is important to stress the fact that, even though Arabic is spoken out of necessityby some people in Berber communities in towns such as Nalut, Arabic is not viewed ina negative light by Berber speakers. In contrast, many Berber speakers in settings suchas these have come to have a high regard for Arabic and they endorse the values that arecommonly associated with possessing good Arabic skills. This is because, in addition to itsassociation with sacred ritual and religious observance, Arabic provides access to scarcerewards in the professional domain as well as being a means of displaying the attainmentof a desired social status. While Berber is used in local life worlds, with close friends andfamily 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 closelymonitored. Take schools, for example, where teachers and school officials are requiredto ensure the implementation of the Arabic-only policy within the school premises, andespecially within classrooms. In fact, the use of Modern Standard Arabic has long beenembedded within the schools in Berber areas in Libya, ever since the establishment of themodern school system in the early 1950s. Before that, the only schools in the region werefaith 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 Berberlanguage has, therefore, never been used in schools and there has been no tradition ofreading 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 theprofessionalism of teachers.

Multilingual classroom discourse: a critical, ethnographic perspective

In this paper, we draw on critical sociolinguistic and ethnographic research in whichlanguage ideology is seen as an essential part of the social grounding of language use. Inthis view, the language practices and language choices of individual speakers are shapedby beliefs, commonsense notions and values related to particular languages in their socialworld, and, cumulatively, over time, their language practices and choices contribute tothe reproduction of these beliefs, values and commonsense understanding (Blackledge2008; Gal and Woolard 2001; Heller 1999; Woolard 1998). In multilingual communitieswhere language ideologies are most visible, some languages come to be seen as havinggreater value than others. In Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, they come to be seen as a ‘legitimatelanguages’, particularly in institutional settings such as schools. Drawing on this conceptfrom the work of Bourdieu, Heller and Martin-Jones (2001, 2) argue that key questionsto address in school-based research include: ‘what ways of using language, what kinds oflanguage practices are valued and considered good, normal, appropriate, or correct in theframework of ideological orientations connected to social, economic, and political interests’.

In research on education in multilingual contexts, there has been an enduring con-cern with the interactional and ideological processes involved in the construction oflegitimate language (e.g. Heller 1999; Jaffe 1999; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001; Linand Martin 2005; Saxena 2009; Blackledge and Creese 2010; Cincotta-Segi 2011;Chimbutane 2011). Researchers have traced the ways in which language ideologiescirculate within broader socio-cultural and socio-political arenas and they have exam-ined how such ideologies are reproduced and/or contested within the daily interactionalroutines of classrooms. They have also revealed the specific, situated ways in whichteachers’ 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 discontinuitiesbetween students’ home- and community-based discourses and the discourses about lan-guage that they encounter in their classrooms. Individual students have to navigate thesediscontinuities. Moreover, language ideologies may function as a ‘hidden curriculum’ andclassroom discourse practices can convey deeper messages about how the world oper-ates, about what kind of knowledge is socially valued, and who may speak and in whatmanner (Mertz 1998). However, dominant language ideologies are not reproduced uni-formly across teaching/learning contexts and teachers assume different stances vis-a-visofficial 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, teach-ers respond to language policies within an interactive frame which includes their owninterpretation of policy imperatives and their own knowledge of and affiliation to localcommunities of practice. Hornberger and Johnson (2007, 510–511) argue that we needto investigate the specific ways in which the processes of language policy and planningare played out in different multilingual settings and show how ‘they create or restrictideological and implementational spaces for multilingual pedagogies’. In this same vein,Creese (2005) and Menken and Garcıa (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 islimited, teachers and students resort to a range of creative strategies for dealing with theseconstraints.

The study

We turn now to the classrooms in Nalut, in the west of Libya, where Adel Asker carriedout ethnographic fieldwork over the whole of the school year in 2009. His focus was ontwo secondary school English classes in a school where English was taught as a specialitysubject. The wider study from which this data is drawn was investigating the links betweenthe 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 classroomsover a four month period and on audio-recordings of particular moments of multilingualclassroom interactions (Berber/Arabic/English). The data extracts discussed below revealthe subtle and complex nature of the multilingual interactions within different partici-pant structures in these classrooms and they show the different ways in which individualteachers and students drew on the linguistic resources available to them and the specificmanner in which their discourse practices were indexically oriented to wider languageideologies.

The data presented here was gathered with two student participants and two teachersbased in two different classrooms. As well as audio-recordings and field notes, the dataalso includes consecutive ethnographic interviews with the participants. These interviewswere conducted in Berber and explored the participants’ attitudes towards language use anddocumented their accounts of the language choices they made in the classroom. Our analysisfocuses on the ways in which the multilingual practices, captured in audio-recordings ofparticular episodes, indexed wider language ideologies and policies. Since these wereEnglish language classes, this included the enduring ideologies regarding the sole use ofthe target language in the classroom.

Navigating language policies and dominant language ideologies: multilingualresources in classroom interactions

Since the two classrooms in the school in this study were in Nalut, in the heart of the Berber-speaking region in Libya, all the students and teachers spoke Berber as their first languageand 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 andEnglish, but they never switched into Berber. During the four months of fieldwork, AdelAsker 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 boardand to give basic organizational instructions. They then switched to Arabic when theyneeded to explain something, to provide explicit comments on the structure of English,to translate individual words and sentences, to guide students and to navigate betweenactivities or to convey other formal and casual messages. The teachers put a great deal ofemphasis on explicit and accurate explanation of English language structures and accurateArabic translation of English texts. They followed a largely traditional approach to languageteaching and teachers’ instructional discourse dominated the interactions. The teacher-lednature of the talk in Arabic limited the extent to which the students were exposed to Englishand created very few opportunities for meaningful interaction or for spontaneous studentcontributions to classroom conversations.

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The predominant use of Arabic was partly due to the teachers’ lack of confidence in theirown abilities in spoken English and partly due to their concern about observing school andnational policy regarding the official medium of instruction. In contrast, the students movedin and out of Arabic, Berber and English. They used English and Arabic when they wererequired to do so and when they were going along with the teachers’ agenda. However, theyused Berber when speaking to each other and when they wanted to signal disengagementwith the lesson or to mount small challenges to teacher authority. This contrast between themultilingual-discourse practices of the teachers and the students indexed different languageideologies regarding the use of Arabic and of Berber in the school context, as we will showin 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 particularlystrong commitment to the Arabic-only policy and reacted negatively to the students’ useof Berber in whole-class interactions. For instance, Hanna,3 the grammar teacher, whohad 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 toEnglish or Arabic when they initiated talk in Berber in whole-class interactions or whenthey responded in Berber to her questions or prompts. In Extract #1 below, we see Hanna’sreaction to the use of Berber by one of her students. In this extract, Hanna is initiating awarm-up activity by inviting the students’ to talk about social gatherings (the transcriptionconventions for this and other extracts are set out in the Endnotes4).

Extract 1:

1 T: where do we meet new friends?2 S1: birthday parties?3 T: yes, birthday parties, or. . . .?4 S2: <B> [<B> weddings]5 T: in English

6 S2: <A> [<A>I do not know what it is in English]7 T: in Arabic. . .

8 S2: <A> [<A> weddings]9 T: in weddings, yes, or. . .. where else do you meet new friends?

Here, one student (S2) used Berber (line 4) to answer Hanna’s question. Hanna respondedby 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) thatat least the Arabic equivalent of the word should be provided. Her insistence on the useof the Arabic word indexed her commitment to classroom observance of the Arabic-onlypolicy, despite the fact that Berber was a language that she shared with the students anddespite the fact that either Berber or Arabic could have served the same communicativepurpose 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 em-ployed was that of recasting the students’ utterances and replacing Berber words withArabic words as shown in Extract #2 below. Here, the students were studying the functionof modal verbs. They were learning how to make requests in English, drawing on examplesfrom the textbook.

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Extract 2:

1 F: Amal, may I use your laptop?2 T: Fadiya, what are you asking for here?3 F: use the laptop4 T: yes, but what is the function of ‘may’ here?

5 F: <E> may <A> . . . <B> [<E> may <A>in thiscase asks for <B>permission]

6 T: <A> [<A>asks for permission]

7 F: <A> (repeats) [<A> asks for permission]8 T: it asks for permission

In the multilingual interaction above, Hanna recast in Arabic ( [æleð n]) (line 6) the

keyword in Berber ( [ �i:r t]) given by the student (Fadiya) in (line 5).5 Fadiyamerely took up the Arabic version provided (line 7) and then Hanna repeated the utterancein English (line 8). Here, Hanna merely models the legitimate language of the lessonrather than making a meta-comment as in Extract #1. Here again, we see that both Berberand Arabic could have served the same purpose, that of enabling the student to showunderstanding despite the fact that she had a lexical gap.

In an interview conducted later, Hanna made an unexpected revelation when Adel Askerasked 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 languageand you waste half of the class watching their language. The classroom is not a classroom if studentsare talking to me in Berber. I do not insist that they use English all the time because I know it isdifficult and unrealistic but there is no excuse for them to use Berber in the classroom. (Interviewwith Hanna in Berber, October 2009)

During this interview, Hanna began by referring to the students’ use of Berber in herclasses as ‘disrespectful’. In addition, she represented the speaking of Berber as a threatto her professionalism as a teacher, saying: ‘The classroom is not a classroom if studentsare talking to me in Berber.’ When asked about her reliance on Arabic in her class, sheattributed this to the difficulty of communicating solely in English. In this interview, whichwas 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 moretowards constructing a ‘legitimate language’ than providing opportunities for learners todraw 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 requireher students to switch to Arabic when they addressed her in Berber. She thus allowed thecommunicative practices in her classes to be fluid and multilingual and, at the same time, shebuilt on her understanding of the students’ Berber utterances to facilitate communicativeinteraction. Extract #4 below illustrates the fluid multilingual pedagogy that characterisedher 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 textfor the lesson which was based on a myth:

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Extract 4:

1 S1: <B> <E> myth? [<B> what is the meaning of <E>myth?]2 S2: <E> myth <B> [<E>myth <B>means something3 imaginary]

4 S1: <B> [<B> something like Aliens?]

5 S2 <B> . . ... [<B> no, aliens are science fiction, <E> myth<B> is like. . .]

6 S3: <B> [<B> like the raven]

7 T: <A> (teacher joins S1, S2, and S3’s interaction ([<A> what about amorning raven?]

8 S3: <B> [<B> if the first thing you see in the9 morning is a raven, your day is ruined]10 T: yes, this could be a good example. So we can describe a myth as. . .11 S2: an old story12 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 theirconversation and joined in the interaction (line 7). She asked one of the students (S3) toelaborate on how ravens were related to the concept of myth. Her intervention was made inArabic. The student continued in Berber and gave an example of a myth in a louder voiceand, following her example, Wafa also raised her voice to address the whole class and sharethe example with them. She did this in English (lines 10 and 12).

Although Wafa’s pragmatic approach to language policy implementation in her classmay not have been motivated by an understanding of the potential of Berber for the develop-ment of meaningful communicative practice, one of the consequences of her approach wasthe opening up of more opportunities for genuine teacher–student dialogue. Her tolerantattitude towards the use of Berber in her classes was clearly expressed in the followinginterview extract. She was responding to Adel Asker’s questions about the students’ use ofBerber in her classes.

Extract #5:

There is nothing you can do about it. You have two options: either you spend the whole class tellingthe students off for speaking Berber or ignore it and get on with your lesson. In my first years ofteaching, I started every New Year telling myself that I would not let the students speak Berber butthat turned out to be impossible. The thing is that many students stop engaging with the class when Iinsist on speaking only Arabic or English and that has made me decide that speaking Berber is betterthan silence and disengagement. (Interview with Wafa in Berber, November 2009)

Wafa never spoke Berber herself during all the classroom observations carried out by AdelAsker, but her account above and her actual classroom practice revealed her tolerant attitudetowards 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 inwhole-class interactions, neither of them attempted to prohibit the students from usingit in when they interacted with their peers. Moreover, the fact that all students shared adouble study desk with one of their peers meant that they were continuously engaged in

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on-task and off-task interactions. As we will see in the sections below, even when thestudents were on-task, they drew on all the linguistic resources available to them (Berber,Arabic and English) to clarify and correct each other’s use of English, and to explainand translate structures and utterances in the textbook that they did not comprehend. Thecodeswitching that they engaged in during peer interactions was shaped by the demands ofthe communicative situation and by their own language capabilities. In fact, the teacherspaid little attention to these ‘off-stage’ interactions between students. What really countedwas being able to provide convincing ‘on-stage’ performances during whole-class, teacher-led interactions. It was during these ‘on-stage’ interactional sequences, which typicallyfollowed the initiation–response–(feedback) pattern, that dominant ideologies about theuse of Arabic or English surfaced most often.

Switching languages, managing relationships

When this study was carried out, most students at the secondary school level in Libyawere expected to be able to communicate in Arabic because, at this stage, they had spent aminimum of nine years using Arabic as the main medium of instruction. All the students inthe two classrooms discussed here appeared to speak Arabic, but with varying degrees ofcompetence and fluency. Those students with less competence in Arabic were sometimessubjected to mocking by their peers when they uttered unusual Arabic phrases and this meantthat they showed considerable reluctance to speak in Arabic. However, secondary schoolteachers, such as the ones in this study, did not express much sympathy with those studentswho claimed that they were not confident in speaking Arabic. The commonsense view,that is, speaking Berber reflected ill-disciplined and challenging behaviour, was widelyarticulated by teachers, such as Hanna.

This commonsense view was also expressed by some students and guided their commu-nicative practices in the classroom. Take, for example, the case of one of the students fromthe school in this study. Hajer was an outstanding third-year student who strived to earn topgrades and outperform her peers. She had been top of her year group in her first and secondyear in the current school. She was 17 years old at the time when Adel Asker’s fieldworkwas carried out. Hajer was described by her teachers as clever, motivated, hard working anda 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. Shespoke Berber and Arabic with ease and fluency. She could also read and write English withease and fluency, but her abilities in spoken English were less developed. As she pointedout in her interview, she rarely spoke English in the class and these were occasions whenshe was participating in classroom tasks focused on the textbook.

Hajer was one of the few students in her class who never attempted to address theteachers in Berber. At the same time, she used Berber consistently when she interactedwith her peers. Extract #6 below shows how Hajer moved in and out of Berber, Arabic andEnglish as she was engaged in a task with her desk partner (Sarah). On this occasion, theywere discussing the meaning of the verb ‘try’ which occurred in a reading passage that theywere reading silently.

Extract 6:

1 S: <E> The case was tried (reading from the textbook) <B>

2 [<B>I cannot understand it]

3 H: <B> (turns to the teacher)

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

5 T: <E> no, it means <A> [<A> tries, a legal term]

6 S: <B> [<B> how do I know which is the7 intended meaning?]

8 H: <B> (turns to the

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

We can see how Hajer responded to Sarah in Berber (line 3) in order to try to explain toher the specialist, legal use of the term ‘tried’. She then turned to the teacher (line 4) andasked her in Arabic to validate her explanation. The same pattern of interlocutor-relatedlanguage choice continued throughout the interaction. Hajer was consistent in addressingher peer in Berber and her teacher in Arabic. From her interviews with Adel Asker, it wasclear that Hajer thrived in the institutional context of the school and had also embracedits 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 viewsabout 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 astudent. It’s bad enough that we do not speak enough English in the classroom and the classsometimes becomes anything but a class when everyone is speaking in Berber. (Interview withHajer in Berber, December 2009)

While she made concerted efforts to maintain her image as an ‘ideal student’ by alwaysaddressing her English teachers in Arabic and English, she never used these languages withher peers. She was equally keen to remain socially accepted by her peers. Addressing themin 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 andbuild different relationships and to position herself in different ways within the complexcommunicative spaces of the language classroom.

Switching languages, engaging and disengaging with learning and with teacherauthority

For those students who wanted to express dissatisfaction or frustration, speaking Berberserved as a key communicative resource. Nada was one such student. Although Nada wasconsidered to be one of the top students in her class, she often engaged in challenging anddisruptive behaviour. Like Hajer, Nada spoke Berber at home and in her local neighbourhoodand 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 herinterviews with Adel Asker, that she had chosen to become an English-major studentbecause 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 spokenEnglish that she had attained after spending almost three years in the current school. Shehad described her learning experience as a ‘waste of three years’. At the same time, herdesire 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 wouldthink about a future career at a later stage.

Adel Asker’s field notes from his classroom observations revealed that Nada’s dis-ruptive behaviour involved practices like being argumentative with the teachers, makingunnecessary comments at inappropriate times, resisting her teachers’ authority, and some-times withdrawing completely from engagement with learning and refusing to participatein any activity. Among these aspects of challenging behaviour, observed by Adel Asker,was Nada’s frequent use of Berber in addressing her teachers. In Extract #8 below, we seeher switching from Arabic to Berber and vice versa. The teacher has just asked the wholeclass to think of local examples of body language:

Extract 8:

1 T: can you think of an example of a local body language sign we use?2 N: thumbs up.

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

4 [<A> Can you think of a sign more local to our culture]5 N: <B> [<B> what do you mean by ‘local’,

teacher? Don’t we all use the thumbs-up sign?]

6 T: yes we do <A> [<A> but I meant7 a sign that is specific to us as Libyans]8 N: <B> [<B> there are many]9 T: can you tell one?

10 N: <A> [<A> like shrugging shoulders when11 We say I do not know]

In this extract, Nada challenged the feedback she received from her teacher by insistingthat the thumbs-up sign was an example of local body language. In the original Berberutterance, her wording was particularly challenging. Moreover, this challenge was madein a context where students rarely challenged teacher authority. The teacher dealt withthis by agreeing but also asking for an example that could be distinctly ‘Libyan’. For thisteacher, ‘local culture’ meant ‘national culture’ and her use of Arabic could be interpretedas a means of indexing this ‘national culture’. As we see in this extract, Nada switched toBerber 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, toindicate that she knew the answer. When the teacher asked her to elaborate, she switchedback to Arabic in her final turn to refer to another example of ‘local’ body language and toillustrate when it is used. In other similar interactions with her teachers observed by AdelAsker, Nada tended to switch to Arabic when she was positively engaged with an activityor when a teacher paid attention to what she said and appeared to value it, whereas shetended 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 anEnglish language specialist school in Libya, in 2009, were navigating national-language-in-education policies, along with the ideologies about Berber, Arabic and English that werecirculating at the time. With reference to interviews, audio-recordings and observationsof classroom talk, we have provided some insights into the ways in which these ideolo-gies and commonsense understandings of language shaped some of the daily rounds of

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communicative life in English lessons and we have shown some of the ways in which theseideologies and understandings were articulated in the teachers’ and students’ own accounts.

Earlier critical, interpretive and ethnographic research in classrooms in other post-colonial 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 policiesis keenly felt in public schools because of the way in which they operate as institutions linkedto the nation-state and as spaces where national, official language policies are accordedlegitimacy and authority. During the years when the Gaddafi regime held sway in Libya,a particularly authoritarian strategy for achieving national unity was imposed through theArabic-only policy in education. In English classes, this was coupled with a preoccupationwith the use of the ‘target language’ in the classroom.

The teachers and students in the classes in this study were clearly constrained by thewider institutional and ideological context in which they were working. However, in thebrief classroom conversations and in the interview extracts we have examined here, we seethat the teachers and students were responding in different ways to these constraints, asactive and artful social actors. In particular, we see teacher and student agency at work inthe extracts of classroom talk, reminding us that the imposition of power and of legitimatelanguage 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’ groupwork and in discussions with their peers. However, in the whole-class interactions, the twoteachers reacted in different ways to ‘on-stage’ use of Berber, with one teacher upholdingthe Arabic-only policy and with the other teacher taking a more relaxed approach and, atthe same time, facilitating interactions and constructing a fluid, multilingual pedagogy. Thetwo 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 toher teacher’s views regarding the use of Berber in the classroom and colluded with herteacher’s agenda while, at the same time, drawing on Berber in communicating with herclassmates and building a relationship with them. In contrast, Nada engaged in small actsof resistance or disengaged from the learning process altogether. Her challenges to teacherauthority were indexed through her use of Berber. Both students brought Berber, the spokenlanguage of their local life worlds, into the institutional spaces of the school and into theEnglish classroom, albeit in different ways and with different purposes.

As McCarty (2011, 17) puts it, a critical ethnographic approach gives us ‘a view intoLPP [language planning and policy] processes in fine detail – up close and in practice’.When combined with analysis of multilingual-classroom-discourse practices, it can alsoilluminate the daily consequences of language policies for those most closely involved. Therecent political transformation of Libya has opened up opportunities for the developmentof research of this kind. Ethnography requires extended fieldwork and engagement withresearch participants, so it allows researchers to engage in critical dialogue with teachersand students as the research unfolds. In this north-west region of Libya, it would allow re-searchers to build a sound understanding of the ways in which students’ language resourcesare used inside and outside the classroom and to contribute this knowledge to future debatesabout the respective roles of Berber, Arabic and English in education.

Notes1. 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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354 A. Asker and M. Martin-Jones

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 formatITALICS between square brackets Translation of Arabic or/and Berber into EnglishNORMAL Roman font Transcription for English utterancesBOLD Arabic font Transcription for Arabic utterancesNORMAL Arabic font (non-bold) Transcription of Berber utterances

Symbols< > Marks the beginning of an utterance in a different language i.e. code switch<A> Marks the beginning of an utterance in Arabic<B> Marks the beginning of an utterance in Berber<E> Marks the beginning of an utterance in English

These symbols are also used in the English translations of the Arabic andBerber utterances

( ) Brackets in the line of speech represent additional information, such asnon-verbal actions, e.g. (hesitation);

. . . Pause: the number of dots indicates the relative length of each pause.Full stop Used after words spoken with falling intonationQuestion mark Rising intonation

ParticipantsS1, S2 (etc.) Students identified, but not by nameT Teacher

5. The mixed Berber–Arabic utterance should be read from the right to left, following the conven-tions of the Arabic writing system.

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