Amazighs in Moroccan EFL textbooks: An integrated critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This study is a critical appraisal of official knowledge about: (1) Amazigh ethnic groups in Morocco; (2) the socio-semantic resources for representing them; and (3) the interaction between Amazigh ethnic groups and the dominant Arab group in 33 EFL textbooks which have been developed, approved, and distributed by the Moroccan Ministry of Education, and have been required to be used in every school, public or private from the early 1980s up to the present. Examined though an integrated CDA model which is inspired Van Leeuwen’s (1996) social actor analysis, Scott's (2018) sociology of the (un)marked, and Bank’s (1989) Ethnic Content Integration model, the findings demonstrated that Amazighs have received varying degrees of discursive representation, ranging from suppression, fixation, cataloguing and backgrounding to partial inclusion and fractional participation. The analyzed EFL textbooks were also found to promote an official stance that can be lexicalized in five main discourses about Amazighs. Such a stance, I argue here, is a clear instance of an exclusionary discourse whose impacts, the study recommends, should be well-adjusted by integrating more precise and wide-ranging ethnic knowledge in Moroccan EFL textbooks.