Literacy of Moroccan Children in Germany: Resources and Obstacles

1999-2002, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation

Literacy Practices as Forms of Cultural Identity: the Case of Moroccan Children and Adolescents in Morocco

2002-2004, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation

Prof. Dr. Utz Maas, Dr. Ulrich Mehlem

Literacy implies not only the learning of reading and writing at school, but includes a wide range of knowledge, skills and beliefs related to written language and its use in a given society (Wagner 1993). One of the main obstacles for the integration of immigrant children is not just the acquisition of the host language, but an access to literacy in this broad sense that would allow school success and better professional careers. This holds especially for the Moroccan community in Germany of approximately 150.000 individuals, neglected in former migration research, whose children are overrepresented in schools for retarded learners and underrepresented in high schools. (Maas & Mehlem 2003: 36)

The first project of Maas & Mehlem aimed at analysing the linguistic and cultural bagage of these children that may play a major role in literacy acquisition - as ressources or obstacles. Therefore, the complex relationships between writing systems, orthographies, non-standard vernacular languages and cultural identity had to be studied in detail, including texts of oral and written language elicited in a picture description task (in German, Moroccan Arabic and Tarifit Berber), dictations (in German and Classical Arabic), questionnaires and field notes collected in different social contexts of the dayly life of these children at German school, in home language teaching, in the mosque and during leisure time in a Moroccan association. As the linguistic situation of the Moroccan immigrant children in Germany cannot be interpreted without a knowledge of the situation in the country of origin, their linguistic data were compared with two reference groups of German children and Moroccan children in Morocco, originating from the towns of Nador and Oujda in Eastern Morocco, like the great majority of the Moroccan children in Germany.

The linguistic situation of the Moroccan children in Germany can be described as follows: they learn the official language of the host country at school, while their home language (mostly Tarifit Berber, but also Moroccan Arabic) is restricted in its scope to their family and the networks of their own community. But already in the usually multinational peergroups, a spoken register of the language of the host country is used. Modern Standard Arabic as the official language of the home country is taught in the framework of “mother tongue teaching” only for some hours a week and in parents’ associations or mosques. At the same time in Morocco, Moroccan Arabic is getting more and more an informal vernacular language at the national level, and Berber is now accepted in the national discourse as a part of the national heritage, with French being still obligatory in many social domains. The Moroccan immigrants’ home languages in Europe are more or less cut off from these recent developments.

The basic corpus of the project was formed by 73 spontaneously written texts in the non-standard varieties of Moroccan Arabic and Berber. The choice of the writing system was free, but the majority of the children in Germany chose Latin script (62), while only a small group wrote with Arabic characters (11). In Morocco, almost exclusively the Arabic script was used, for Moroccan Arabic and Tarifit Berber likewise. However, writing does not only include the choice of a writing system – but also specific strategies of orthography, starting with document design, articulation of paragraphs and sentences, word formation and separation, treatment of clitics, representation of phonemes and prosodic features on the syllabic and segmental levels. In selecting from these strategies, the students showed some of their cultural orientations in an indirect manner, which were not accessible by direct questioning or only in a censored version.

The analysis of spontaneously written texts in the home language constitutes an instrument of indirect measuring of cultural attitudes. These measures are based on the concept of „matrix script“ (Maas & Mehlem 2003: 20ff.) which has been developed and tested in the project. It conceptualises the fundamental notions of orthography as an independent factor – not directly related to the material aspect of writing. The option for a certain system of writing – which constitutes in itself a cultural choice – is partially independent of the orthographic rules inherent to that writing system. A Berber text written with Arabic characters in Germany can look like very „German“ with respect to the separation of words; the same text written in Morocco in Latin script can be very „Arabic“ in terms of the representation of syllabic structures. (Maas & Mehlem 2003: 507, 510)

One of the main results of the first project was that a majority of the Moroccan children that grew up in Germany did not only succeed in acquiring basic orthographical notions of German – even with a certain delay compared to monolingual German children – but also to transfer this knowledge when writing spontaneously their non-written vernacular language. This can be considered as a great step towards cultural integration – which however is usually not valorised or even realised by the German schools (Maas & Mehlem 2003: 509ff.). As the Programme of international students’ assessment (PISA) showed, the German school system is not very effective in counterbalancing social and cultural “disadvantages” of minority groups, thus leading to school failure and exclusion of many immigrant children. The report of Maas & Mehlem sheds some light on the ressources that should be taken into account in German schools in order to prevent such developments.

The second project, that is supposed to end this year, focused on questions of literacy practice and identity in Morocco. As the formation of cultural identity implies an individual‘s use of his/her different linguistic resources and their re-evaluation during the process of acquiring the written language at school, language attitudes and language use of Moroccan students in three different age groups have been analised: Beginners of primary school, children at the end of primary school and adoslescents in high school. Again, the spontaneous writing of the vernacular languages of Tarifit Berber and Moroccan Arabic was in focus.

Although all 114 children (with only one outlier, writing Tarifit Berber in Latin script) opted spontaneously for Arabic script, a wide range of differences could be observed with respect to the application of orthographic rules of Standard Arabic. In many cases conflicts arose between different principles and norms, that the children solved in very divergent directions: a specific hierarchy of constrains could be established that showed the dominance of a normative approach (applying the norms of Standard Arabic as much as possible), while on the other side of the spectre a certain emancipation of the norm could be observed, aiming at a more consistent and faithful representation of the home language. This can be shown very strikingly for Moroccan Arabic, but to a lesser extent even for Tarifit Berber. As expected in the preliminary hypothsis, the writing strategies did not always correspond to openly uttered language preferences. Two special types of writers could be observed: those who stuck very closely to the norms of Standard Arabic, while showing a strong preference for French at the same time, and those who emancipated from normative constraints although they opted in favor of the official language of their country.

In analysing literacy practices, the projects thus contributed to a better understanding of an important dimension of the formation of identity of Moroccan adolescents in an immigration context and a context of origin with respect to religious, ethnic, national and transnational models. At the same time it could be demonstrated that literacy practices are constituting a stepping stone in the process of the integration of immigrant children.

Publikationen:

Utz Maas/Ulrich Mehlem, Sprache und Migration in Marokko und in der marokkanischen Diaspora in Deutschland, in: IMIS-Beiträge, H. 11, Osnabrück 1999, pp. 65-105.

Utz Maas/Ulrich Mehlem: Schriftkulturelle Probleme der Migration: Kinder marokkanischer Einwanderer in Deutschland, in: Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS-Schriften, Bd. 11), Osnabrück 2002, pp. 333-366.

Utz Maas/Ulrich Mehlem, Schriftkulturelle Ressourcen und Barrieren bei marokkanischen Kindern in Deutschland. Abschlußbericht des Projekts „Schriftkulturelle Ressourcen und Barrieren bei marokkanischen Kindern in Deutschland“. IMIS, Osnabrück 2003, 610 pp. (pdf-download: part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4)

Utz Maas/Ulrich Mehlem, Schriftkulturelle Ausdrucksformen der Identitätsbildung bei marokkanischen Kindern und Jugendlichen in Marokko. Abschlußbericht des von der Stiftung Volkswagenwerk 2002-2004 am Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) der Universität Osnabrück geförderten Forschungsprojekts. IMIS, Osnabrück 2005, 350 pp. (pdf-download: part 1 – part 2 – part 3)

Utz Maas/Ulrich Mehlem/Christoph Schroeder, Mehrsprachigkeit und Mehrschriftigkeit bei Einwanderern in Deutschland, in: Klaus J. Bade, Michael Bommes/Rainer Münz (eds.), Migrationsreport 2004. Fakten – Analysen – Perspektiven, Frankfurt a.M./New York 2004, pp. 117-149.

Ulrich Mehlem, Structures de temporalité dans les narrations des élèves marocains en Allemagne: le passage de l'oral à l'écrit, in: Languages and Linguistics, 8. 2001, Fes: Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, pp. 133-151.

Ulrich Mehlem, Die Nutzung orthographischer Strukturen des Deutschen in der Verschriftung familiensprachlicher Texte durch marokkanische Migrantenkinder, in Christa Röber-Siekmeyer/Doris Tophinke (eds..), Schrifterwerbskonzepte zwischen Sprachwissenschaft und Pädagogik, Hohengehren 2001, pp. 123-143.

Ulrich Mehlem, Experiment Muttersprache. Marokkanische Kinder schreiben Berberisch und Arabisch in Deutschland, in: Jürgen Erfurt/G. Budach/S. Hofmann (eds.), Mehrsprachigkeit – Migration – Schule, Frankfurt a.M./Berlin 2003.

Ulrich Mehlem, Kasusmarkierungen in Verschriftungen mündlicher Nacherzählungen bei marokkanischen Migrantenkindern, in: Gesa Siebert-Ott/Ursula Bredel/Tobias Thelen (eds.), Schrifterwerb und Orthographie, Hohengehren 2004, pp. 162-188.

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