‘A classroom is not a classroom if students are talking to me in Berber’: language ideologies and multilingual resources in secondary school English classes in Libya

Abstract

This paper reports on an ethnographic study carried out by Adel Asker in 2009, with teachers and learners, in English classes in a secondary school in the north-west of Libya. Arabic is the official medium of instruction in all Libyan secondary schools, but most teachers and students in this region are Berber speakers. Adel Asker's aim was to investigate the ways in which beliefs and ideologies about ‘appropriate’ language use, embedded in broader socio-cultural, political and historical contexts, were being reproduced through multilingual classroom interaction and codeswitching practices, in local English classes. In this paper, we show how teachers and students’ own accounts of their multilingual practices revealed different beliefs and ideologies about the ‘appropriacy’ 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 and Arabic, employing the contrast between these languages as a communicative resource and as a means of indexing wider cultural values. We demonstrate how they did this in whole-class teacher–student interactions and in student–student interactions, in situated negotiation of language learner identities, sometimes colluding with and sometimes contesting the teachers’ agenda.