 Welcome everybody. My name is Julia Niebuhr. I'm from the linguistics department and I'm hosting today's speaker. It's a great pleasure to have a round. Konstantin Zavage from the University of Luxembourg, which is a very versatile research of broad range of interests, many of which are connected to research. We're doing a source, among other things, ethnography of multilingual, multimodal practices in Moroccan families in France, literacy acquisition in multilingual contexts and also multi-scriptile contexts and orthography transfer. So if I'm not mistaken, she's worked in the part of Moroccan families in southern France and now having been transplanted to the multilingual context of Luxembourg, she is looking at multilingual orthography teaching in Luxembourg classrooms. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having invited me. Do you understand me when I talk like that? I worked during my PhD. I worked in southern France. I was interested in minority languages in general in southern France. First, about Occitan languages, not autonomous language like Basque, Catalan, Britain. And then I was curious about how do different minorities, called minority, language minorities, read and write and have reading and writing practices in France. And after having looked very closely to Occitan families, I went over to a typical immigration group in France. It was Moroccan families. And I did my PhD about literacy practices, reading and writing practices in families and at school in Occitan French-speaking families and in Moroccan Arabic French-speaking families. I was trained. That was my PhD and my data. My collected data at this time dates already from 2003. I published my PhD in 2007. But I was looking back recently in a particular frame of my linguistic data I had collected during my PhD and this is what I will present to you today. To give you just a word about my background, I'm not a Semitic, fluent person, really very, very... No, I don't speak Arabic. I did two years of classes of Arabic and of Moroccan Arabic and standard Arabic. I'm a Romans linguist and at the time of my data collection in 2003, I managed to follow the Arabic classes of the 10-year-old children I will show you. I managed to live half a year in a Moroccan family who did code-switching between Moroccan Arabic and French. But we have 11 years later, so my Arabic still is not... Yeah, it did not happen to practice it. So in my... When I chill the title about conflicting expectations and multilingual literacy acquisition for the talk today and maybe when you look at writing or literacy, it is even more than the spoken language, it is more submitted to norms and to an idea of correctness. And when you have reading and writing acquisition in a multilingual context, this idea of norms and of what is written correctly depends on the different literacy practices and the families and the informal surroundings and it depends on the very explicit, very much prescriptive norms in schools. So children in my study will be children at primary school are confronted between this family, families surrounding norms and what they learn at school and what they have to do at school. So in this different... When you have the Arabic group in France and these literacies are so different, then these competences may get in conflict in these different social groups, families against schools. And I was curious how the children will deal with these different literacy acquisitions. I will present you in a minute. So today I will present you a group of 10-year-old multilingual children growing up in southern France with a Moroccan background. And I will briefly present you the findings of an ethnography which I did in my PhD and where my PhD was focusing on of these literacy practices in the families and schools of these children. And I will focus today on some writing of these children in their family language, Moroccan. Moroccan is not a written language, so adolescents or adults often write Moroccan Arabic in chat rooms in SMS, etc. But they don't write and it's not a standardized written language and most of the family members did not meant that they... So they asked very often, can one write Moroccan Arabic? Is that possible? So for them it's a very dialect. And in my ethnography I focused on this conflicting expectations of French and Arabic literacy in families and schools and in the orthography analysis I will present you now. I was asking how the children deal with the literacy requirements within the task to write down this family language for the first time of their life. The aim of my talk is to present you my study of course. But however I would like to discuss afterwards the methodological framework doing an ethnography and then a structural orthographic analysis at a time which focuses very different perspectives of the setting and the results are complementary but they can be discussed being how complementary they are. Maybe for those who are not very familiar with France, we have here a map which shows the... Highlight is the quantity of population immigrated to France and just to show you where my investigation town was, 100,000 inhabitants town in southern France with a high quantity of migration of the Margarine population. So people from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. And looking at these statistics when you look at the discourses and statistics of Moroccan population, it's repeatedly that the Margarine immigrants come very often from lower social classes. They hold very often low qualified jobs. But of course you find Moroccan at all level of status. You find Moroccan people at all level of professions, etc. But my families, they were indeed fruit pickers. Most of all they're fruit pickers and they attended school in Morocco. The men normally went four, five years to school, the women not at all or maybe one or two years and then more to Quranic schools. When we look a bit closer at the district I was working in, I have modelled the district of the town I was working here. And then the different linguistic landscape if you want to call it like this, the yellow is French so you have the big circle all over French. You have the French is the most important language in the town I worked. And the biggest surrounding in France is of course French. Then French is the language of school. So in the school the children are forbidden to speak among them Moroccan Arabic. And you have the district where you listen a lot to French to Moroccan Arabic, couch-switching or depends on the people, only Moroccan, only French. And then you have the families which are much more focused on Moroccan Arabic but there are members of the family speak as well French among them. And if you may ask yourself where is Temazicht, so Berber language. This was a district where no Berber, in my knowledge no Berber family lived. There were some persons with Temazicht background but the common language was Moroccan Arabic. The green spots are written Arabic or standard Arabic and standard Arabic is present in a very particular point really in the district, in the school and in the family. In the district we have the mosque where you have the religious place of the most families. Then the families you have written Arabic, I will show you it later, in the living rooms of the home places. There are a lot of surahs, a lot of Quranic verses which are framed and which are very visible in the families and the families. A lot of family members read the Quran so you have as well I could attend as well this reading forms of Quran, they showed me how to do it. And at school you have Arabic classes which is organized by the Moroccan embassy for Moroccan children, takes place twice a week. And the 10 children I will present to you attend, grew up in this district and they all attend the Arabic class of the school. The children's parents grew up in Morocco and most of them, as I told you, went to school for some years and lots of them went to Quranic schools. So it's quite religious surrounding with people who would be called illiterate from the French hegemonic school perspective. So maybe it's interesting to know that the school is in the district but no teacher lives in the district apart from the Arabic teacher who lives over there and one of the 10 children was his son. And the teachers perceive the children and their families as kind of a decrease of social levels. So it was very much complaining about the, in French you would say Clientel of their pupils. But even if the parents of the children don't read very much, of course there are a lot of texts coming into the homes. And the families read letters from administration from different sorts. They read letters from the school like this one. The school letter has been adapted to the literacy skills of the families in French. They read recipes, they read all kinds of texts, advertisements, etc. And if you have questions about certain slides you can ask me in between or I won't focus on this particular letter now but it's one of the letters attending the families very much. And the reading is not done by the parents alone or a particular person in the family alone but it's always a collective reading. And the reading and writing is practiced in such a collectivity that it is guided by one person which is always the same person very often it's an older daughter who went to school in France and to finish school in France. And this literacy guide, how I called her, translates between French and Moroccan Arabic but she translates as well between the written and the oral code in general. So she translates in a very various way. This letter or other letters are read aloud, then translated between French and Arabic and there is a big co-reading maybe which is ongoing between the different family members. And this competence of the literacy guide is highly valued and perceived as contributing to the family solidarity and it's really part of this family. And when I lived in this family I took the role of this family literacy guide because I was the most literacy part in the family. So in contrast individual reading and writing in France is not seen as a relevant practice. So no one needed really from the perspective of the families because there is one literacy guide who helps out. And individual reading is much more related to solitude and not being part of the community. So the older daughter who figured as a literacy guide for the family she loved to read the newspaper for example and she said that she never would read the newspaper at her home because it's just not the place to read it. But she reads it at her work in a hospital. There in the morning she first reads the newspaper and when I did reading for my work and I lived in this during my living in this family this was very much appreciated but every ten minutes about somebody came into are you fine? Are you okay? Do you need something? And this kind of myself doing reading in the families showed me very much how this individual reading is not perceived in a way that I would perceive my individual reading but in another way. So that's about French texts. Arabic texts look like this actually and the Arabic literacy or written Arabic is very visible as I said in the households and you have a lot of picture frames within different verses of the Quran. Here you have only Allah and Muhammad but they can be a bit bigger. And they are closely related to religious practices and already Qulmas in the end of the 80s he described that these Arabic Quranic verses are kind of aesthetic objects. So they are not meant to be elaborated or rewritten or they are not related to a change of a text or an elaboration of a text but they are kind of aesthetic objects so they are framed. And the families would call these frames Qadr. Qadr is a frame in French and they never speak about I have such a word on my wall. Thank you. But I have this frames on my wall. And this means that for them it's a kind of whole entity and the text in the frame is part of it but it's no matter what it really means and when I asked family members to read me such a text they figured out what Allah is written but all the other words were unknown to them but it was not important to read it but it was much more related to religious experience to experience between friendship to family members to Morocco to the home country of the parents and it was much more a kind of remembrance of a lot of things but nobody needed to read it in this way. So here we don't find the idea of the western literacies to elaborate, to transform or to elaborate and to correct for example a text. Just to go under this I'm not sure very often people when I teach this in a Romans course and I say kinds like this written form as an entity it's very difficult for a lot of people who have grown up in western Europe and have the only known western kind of thinking academic literacies. It's very difficult to grasp that there might be another kind of literacy and this is why I would like to show you a small excerpt of an interview that I translated in English. It's an interview with a mother who tells me how she perceives Arabic when she's what's Arabic for her and she says on Fridays I put my current tape in order to feel close to God. I like as well putting on the television and watch the prayers and what they say about Islam. Sometimes I understand, sometimes I don't but it means a lot to me to listen to the voice of the Imam who's talking, that's it. So here you have the same sense of it's not so much important what content is transported what will then learn new but it's much more related to a feeling of being secure. When we have this family literacy here in French and in Arabic we will move on to the Arabic class of the children that they give. The Arabic class is a secular class so it's not a Quranic course and these children attend Arabic class on the wish of their parents who want them to relate to their to the parents country of origin because a lot of parents have still the idea to return one day they will return to Morocco. And the Arabic class organized by the Moroccan Embassy is in the same impact the same aim to maybe prepare the children who grow up in France who are growing up in France to go back to Morocco one day. The instruction of the Arabic class takes place during class time at the public school and the children who attend this class this Arabic class leave their regular class in order to attend the Arabic course. And the children I investigated attend the Arabic class for almost two years but I realized that the Arabic class does not enable the children to read or write Arabic not even words in Arabic. They kind of know Arabic letters some of them memorized very few words in Arabic but they are not able to read something even not a known text in Arabic. And despite the obvious language instruction because it is when you attend the classes it is you look at a language instruction nothing really else. This first aim of the ELCO of the Arabic classes is not the acquisition of standard Arabic but it rather presents it aims rather presenting to the children a cultural practice and values of the parental country of origin. And when I talked to the Arabic teacher he confirmed that. So he confirmed that he will never really teach standard Arabic to these children but that he really tries to make a link between French society and culture and the family cultures. But when you look at this course during the class standard Arabic is never a language of conversation but it is only the lesson the lesson language I don't know if you call like this so the lesson I put in the focus here is a sentence Karim lives in a big house with his family and the children learn the letter R this here and then they say Ra, Ri, Ru and pronounce the letter with different vowels then they pronounce Karim lives in a big house with his family in Arabic and even the Moroccan Arabic and standard Arabic are quite a part varieties there are still some things you could relate to them so in the terms of similarities or contrasts but when the children ask about some similarities or some some elements they don't understand in the standard Arabic saying the teacher is not able, I'm not sure but he does not refer to that he does not refer to this possibility of contrasting the language varieties and when I asked him and other parents it's so unusual for the Moroccan people I knew to talk about the language because it remains a dialect it is the spoken variety all over but it's not usual at all to find relations between the dialect and the standard Arabic so in this secular context of the Arabic class in school in my perspective standard Arabic is again a distant and almost holy language it's not a Quranic language but it's so distant that the pupils don't really grasp it so they repeat it, they have a kind of saying, not singing but saying like repeating in the choir etc that it's much more related to Quranic classes than to the traditional French classes they experience as well so that's about my ethnography when I started again to look at the writing of the children how do these children who attend French school and as well Arabic classes who grow up in a Moroccan-Arabic-French background how do these children write Moroccan-Arabic language they speak a lot but they have never written I asked me two questions one question how did the children cope with the spelling rules learned in French when they conceived a writing system for their family language Moroccan so how do they grasp their knowledge of French in order to conceive another writing system and do they conceive maybe as well particulars of this writing system in Arabic do they use Arabic letters when they know it and do they maybe as well integrate particular elements of the Arabic writing system which is very different and then the second question does the social background of the Arabic writing practices and the families obstruct the children's access to spelling rules that was one observation I had in my ethnographic study I forgot to say about that the Quranic perception of perceived Arabic texts as an entity has been transported from some parents to every other texts so they looked at the homeworks of their children and the most important they were proud that the children were writing and the most important for them was that it was beautifully written so it was not they couldn't really read it so they couldn't really follow the expectations at the classes but it was stroke out that something was not nicely written that something would be a draft and rewritten but the most important of a lot of parents was that it was beautiful and this kind of observation in my ethnographic study I interpreted this observation as a conflict because the children grew up in these two attendances who want them to rewrite to edit it and to come and to elaborate a text and the parents who obviously don't before I go further to the writing forms of the children very very short introductions to French and Arabic orthography French is an alphabetic script and it is called a deep writing system as English as well actually where you have a lot of spellings that are not related to spoken language for example you don't have the the flexion system is called orthograph grammatical grammar orthography maybe so really an orthography which is related to writing and you don't have the ability to listen to it you don't have an acoustic equivalent Arabic is a syllabic script as you know and I try to put it down so it's written from right to left and you have this different and you have here the word rajul and when you speak it it's rajul and when you write it you have here the article which is a prefix of the noun and then you have the three different root elements and you put the vowels in between very briefly another particularity here is that the article is al and in the written form it is always stable but when you have an alveolar consonant following it will be a doubling of the consonant and not an al anymore so you have very different forms and I was curious about knowing how the children will to which writing system the children will relay on and when I did my analysis I knew that the children had possibilities of writing their languages because they will, they relay on a particular knowledge of French orthography of in a particular way they learn for two years Arabic and Arabic orthography or they may invent other signs which do not exist in any of these known languages but I could do my interpretation in between these two language writing systems that was a picture story I presented to all these children and I asked them to write down these picture stories in all the languages they know I did first an oral an oral orientation about what is the story about and we wrote the story in the Arabic class because I was presuming that when we would do it in the French class nobody would start writing in Arabic but in an Arabic class with the Arabic teacher there might be a surrounding where some pupils would like to start writing Arabic in what kind however the texts I got were looking like this so rather short text that's a French text and that's an Arabic text from the same girl and kind of these texts I got I got 10 children so all children wrote down 16 French stories so most of them wrote two French stories not only one and the French stories were containing on average 55 words and nine of the children wrote their stories on Moroccan Arabic and all together there are 12 stories in the output with on the average 22 words so the Moroccan Arabic stories were shorter than the French stories about half of the word count one child refused to write down Moroccan Arabic and this is an example when you when you look at the French texts it illustrates that the children in general and these children as well is familiar with phoneme grapheme correspondences they separate orthographic roots and correctly spell certain words but the girl here like most of the other children have major difficulties with the written grammatical structure of French orthography and oops and when and when we just focus here it's so tombé so when you look at the markers of French the grammatical markers are mostly missing or placed on a not appropriate place and when you look at the Arabic at their Arabic writing she uses lots of the French forms so she started writing in French orthography and when you look how she dealt with Moroccan Arabic phonological features which are not present in French and which are not represented in French orthography either you see that she helped her out with other letter but I will show it in a better way so I think it's just not readable in this form I have four tables like this in order to show you what the children did and the first table is about French diacritics used in Moroccan writing French diacritics are very much used in the French orthography they are very much used for contrasting and you have the accenture conflicts I don't know in English kind of triangle which exists as well for etymological forms the children when I first looked at the writing I thought that the diacritics were used to make much more similar the Moroccan writing to the French orthography the children used the diacritics in a functional way they used it in order to highlight phonemes who do not exist in French like the pharyngeal consonants like oud and here they put diacritics on the vowels which are more long which are pronounced in a way where the syllables are pronounced much more in the throat and sometimes they combined diacritics with an R which was much more the most similar sound graphic representation in French because it's oud and so they did it they tried to conceive really one sign known in the French writing for the Moroccan writing another particularity is that a lot of words in Moroccan end of consonant and they are mostly represented with a final e which is very conformed to French writing as well and the children did not do it in a constant way maybe because I didn't know French orthography doesn't either have e's at the final position of a word but most of the consonant ending words in Moroccan have been they have been adjusted by an e what I found even more interesting that the children inserted graphic e's they inserted schwarz where you would not really hear schwarz schwarz in Moroccan Arabic and they tried to in Moroccan Arabic you have much more consonant clusters than in French and why are these little e's sometimes it was r but normally it was e the letter e they tended to have a syllabic structure of consonant vowel so that they tried very hard to get this structure you will find in most French words as well finally they had the definite marker which they wrote in three major different forms the definite marker in Moroccan Arabic is l and they wrote it always in the same they wrote it always as l even for alveolar consonants which were following where you would not have a r but for example in like Rajul double r and they followed the French orthography in a way that they used sometimes the alab stroke which is completely correct in French when you have a following starting with a vowel or with a written h that's possible as well or they did it isolated which would not be a French word because you cannot have an l an isolated l but still it seems possible to me and some of them as well put the l at the following noun and here I was asking myself and I don't have an answer if these children who who wrote the definite marker as a prefix to the noun do they follow Arabic rules or not I'm not sure I'm hesitating because they're they've written Arabic was so so poor and because one knows when when you look at French children and French French language acquisition French writing acquisition from French monolingual children they very often use the l as well as one cluster with the noun so they don't really separate at the beginning and I think the reason is no here I will resume and discuss quickly and I will return for that to the research questions I showed you at the beginning of my talk the first research question was how did the children cope with the spelling rules learned in French when they conceived a writing system for their family language Moroccan the one of the answers I found where the children represented all Moroccan in Roman script in the Roman script system they some of them tried to try to start with Arabic script but then they they wrapped it out and they did it again and did it in Latin script a Roman script and they used the knowledge of specific orthographic and grammatical rules of French for example they conceived Moroccan Arabic phonemes with French orthographic features which were really built up in a new way they used the epistrophe in order to represent the definite article they used diagraphic markers in order to highlight phonemes which are typical in Moroccan Arabic and they represented the article the definite marker as a prefix maybe and if they had followed an Arabic rule the most salient rules of written Arabic would have been the representation of the lexical root the emission of short vowels and a consonant representation of the definite marker as a prefix that was what I was expecting when I started my study that they would try to figure out part of these writing system and not really follow so in a such intense way or such close way the French way of writing the second question I was asking was does the social background of the Arabic writing practices and the families obstruct the children's access to spelling rules that was one research that was one result one perspective I've gained during my ethnographic work that the family literacies are very rich but in a way they may obstruct the the literacies the literacies required in the school system of the children and so in this way we being in a kind of taking or giving the children a kind of conflicting situation the orthographic study showed that the children do have access to orthographic and grammatical structures and when you look at the French texts of these children the French texts are very poor in grammatical features but their knowledge seems to be very much enrouted very much based and when you look at orthography as a cultural accommodation you really see that the children integrated very much in the French writing culture I'd say these so the framework of Arabic writing that is associated with Quranic writing in the families and available in the standard Arabic class did not support access to literacy in Arabic and not to French either I'd say however it did not oppose the acquisition of French writing either so because when you see that the children are able to do such a complex process of abstraction then you and this process of abstraction is so deeply enrouted in the French orthographic system I think that these children yes I have kind of very much integrated if you want to get this discourse in the French school system and at the time of my thesis this integration debate was very very much very very loud actually very much around me are these children have these children part of France are they integrated in France are the others who should go back to Morocco there is some problem and on this orthographic level I have the feeling that I that I had evidence that they that they are of course in grown up in France that there is kind of integration process which is maybe not as visible for French teachers which have children at school but they just did not see this kind of knowledge and abstraction process that children do on the context of French literacy thank you do you say stop one more one more this one does the social background with the Arabic writing this one I am not sure I understood that do you what writing practices do you need when the parents are illiterate do you just mean the fact that I think the text is in the house the literacy practices of the Arabic families are very present even if the parents are meant to be illiterate it's about when you look at the French texts or the French literacy practices in the Moroccan family households the collective writing which has a very particular literacy practices and when you when you think that every literacy practice so literacy practices at school literacy practices in Western Europe literacy practices wherever are framed with particular norms and expectations of readers and of writers these literacy practices are there and they read and write collaboratively texts so and this is a surrounding which when I did ethnography perceived as maybe conflictual to the children who see at the one time the collaborative literacy which on the other time this very individual literacy expectation at schools and on the other hand Arabic literacy as well where we have all this Quranic verse frames which are written texts of course and which are read in such a different way than the readings which are expected in the schools I guess I was confused by the fact that this is referring specifically to this bilinguals I mean I can see how it would have struck their access to our literacy in general but specifically to this bilingual yeah but I think that if it would if the family literacy is obstructed the children's spellings the children would not be able to spell to conceive to conceive this highly demanding new writing system for their family language that was my idea so that if they wouldn't do it they wouldn't because you have to gain an idea about what a spelling rule is so words are constructed that words are not a whole that's very rude maybe what I'm doing now that words are not conceived like calligraphies but in a text you could elaborate you could reformulate and correct and where you have to separate words and where you have to respect a certain orthographic maybe graphic tactic there are particular consonants follow particular vowels written vowels written consonants and this in my opinion would not have been possible without a certain input in the in what is writing writing in a western schoolish way Jo, on the other hand sorry actually one could actually if we go back to that where it says conceiving your writing system this one maybe this one yes you can actually see similarities in a particular different direction between both languages and the way that they represent words because in either language it's the word necessarily written as it's as it's spoken so one of those people one of the top they don't know French in the Arabic but the Spanish doesn't necessarily represent the pronunciation the French doesn't necessarily represent the pronunciation so you could actually see the word as a block in both languages that's what they're doing I want to approach the score and it's not just non-lative speakers who write in this way quite literate sometimes or much older for writing in French as a first language where they basically think some of the artists speak in their writing because these are Holocaust right completely right yeah completely right the children the only thing I would maybe adjust is that I would put on is that these children are expected to have skills which are much more related to grammar which they did not have acquainted the expectations of what they actually have in lots of languages people don't necessarily recognize the rules the language the grammar difference in right so in the slide you had earlier the various possible sources for conceiving the right in system the last one was invent other signs which do not exist in any of the non-language this was, yeah and then did we see some examples of those oh sorry do you mean this one I'll give you the next no, the one conceiving the right in system oh do you mean this one yeah okay if they did it they no, not in these corpus but I looked as well as Occitan speaking children as I tried to do a comparison and the Occitan children as a different framework they learn Occitan and they learn French at school but they invented Occitan for the Occitan they invented signs they invented some kind of um um, I don't know kind of circles kind of circles in in order to highlight to highlight syllables they would pronounce much more than in French but the words were so similar so some of them inserted signs for their orientation I think and I was not sure if that was a kind of educational fact but it was not part of the Occitan orthography and I've seen it in another recent project of French children French foreign language in German where I tried to do a dictation for French words and nonsense words and they depended on the background of the children which have been in fourth grade and some a lot of background a lot of these children had migrant background and some were literally were alphabetized in their language and the Turkish children they really they integrated very much Turkish signs in the French writing in order so these kind of other forms but here I was just resuming the possibilities I expected to see so I expected to see different markers of the Arabic of the French writing system but I expected as well maybe other forms of of other forms they have known or calligraphic nice figrations as well I expected these other kinds of signs but there was nothing I was kind of curious if you would expect to have any different results if you had done if you had done the photographic test that you did in the Arabic speaking homes because I might have seen that Arabic is entirely the language of the home and outside of that is you expected to write things in a French style even if it's in Arabic I don't know I perceive that there might be that kind of diacosmy there so I would imagine that you might get different results if they were in the Arabic environment of their home in France I don't think so actually because it was such a weird question of this weird foreigner who was living in this Moroccan family to ask the children to write something down in Moroccan Arabic I don't think that would be an impact an impact would have been one of the children nine children were the children in families of mostly fruit pickers so low literate families and one was the son of the Arabic teacher and if the educational background of the children were I'd say higher and the Arabic teacher tried to teach his son more Arabic than he could do the middle classes so he encouraged his son to write in Arabic and the son really tried to write down in Arabic and I think if the surrounding of the other children would have to do the same he would really try hard in Arabic but as all the other children gave up very quickly or they even don't try to do so this son did not do the effort either I think that was that would be the difference Is this situation do you think this situation is reflective of the general surrounding area of the whole of southern France that has had to be parentless low level of writing and the idea that Maraca so this educated background who's curious about languages who's curious about talking about how to talk how to read who's not reflecting about it and another study where I did where I was very much doing my Ph.D. from Utsmaas they looked at Moroccan families in Germany and in Morocco and looked at the writings as well so they did the same experiment in letting children and adolescents write down Moroccan Arabic in Morocco and some places in Germany and there the ideologies about Arabic language Arabic dialect, Moroccan and Arabic high Arabic standard Arabic written Arabic however it reveals how different they are in the immigrant context and in the Moroccan context and then again between educational sorry my English layers do you say social layers educational social layers so that's the main difference I should give precedence to the audience but I'm sharing anybody who has a question can I have your idea just a second what implications do you use as for bottom-up development for a person like this to bottom up the authorities of the languages or of the read of the writers in order of the children in a pedagogical way to bottom up I didn't understand it for you so rather than the orthography developed by the state or some similar institution then being imposed on speakers the speakers are in the way that they're doing here okay I got it yeah good question very loud as well I don't know I have maybe different answers my personal answer in terms of research was that I started doing that I thought that teachers know so few about literacies around them and that it is really a shame they don't know very much about their orthography either about the French orthography either and nothing about their home literacies around and so since having finished my Ph.D which is quite a while as well I'm framing on how can we researchers try to modelise orthography in a way that teacher understand the regularities in orthography and do a better teaching first that would be an idea in order to better understand not what does only say what is right but as well to understand transitional norms transitional writings kind of development of writing acquisition and reading acquisition that would be in my way one way because then you reflect then you have the possibility to go beyond the prescriptive norms of French language in the school system and then maybe you can as well reflect on other writings for example at this Moroccan writing or being curious about what happens when these children write some another language and then you can get you can just go beyond these prescriptive norms and try to establish variable norms transitional norms in your classroom and in the schools and yeah reflect much more on what the children are doing what yourself are doing instead of saying that's right that's wrong you're bad you're good that's my opinion okay great I'm very interesting at this finally that's my question so I think what I got from your examples was that the children are versed enough in French spelling rules to pick up those elements of French writing that are phony and then transfer them to kind of phonic encoding of Arabic now of course the literacy acquisition is quite asymmetric because they get a lot more input in French and Arabic but I was wondering if you've ever thought about inversing this and seeing how they write French and Arabic characters that's interesting and whether they then would actually follow Arabic spelling rules so that was kind of the first question idea and then another question I have is but these children are learning modern standard Arabic in a secular setting and if you have any comparable study or ideas of studies that have been done in immigrant settings that the children attend Quranic school two of them go to Quranic classes and I did not see any very difference between the children actually but maybe I did not have the right glasses looking at the differences that's very possible I know that Ulrich Melem my colleague in Germany who's at Frankfurt he does a lot about he did a lot about Moroccans in Moroccan families and children in Germany and he he worked together with Quran Fine Quranic associations and Quranic schools and his results about writing Arabic don't differ from mine so I'm not very sure but the other idea is very, very nice and I didn't think about it I didn't think about it because in the paper that someone about Arabic comes to this volume on African Literacy because it established the concept of lead language for vice-proptil writing in Senegal so it's people are in general when they are exposed to or initiated to writing in the Roman script it's in French when they're initiated to writing in the Arabic script it's in classical Arabic so the language of the Quran in these settings and so that leads to an association of the script with a particular language that then becomes kind of lead language which means that whenever they write in Romanist writing the lead language is French so if you apply French spelling rules and whenever you use Arabic script in writing you use not modern standard Arabic but the particular regional tradition for the writing of the Quran which is different from modern standard Arabic so now, of course here you have a clear alignment between one script and one language but it would be really interesting to look at and vice-proptil children bilingual, modern-script children and vice versa and see what happens if a child, for instance speaks and writes two languages using the same script what happens in authentically transcribed settings is there anything? not in my knowledge, no I don't think so is that really relevant also for your question when you think about writing when you think about languages etc or probably development what happens to bilingual vice-proptil children in these contexts there's a lot of articles at the moment appearing about Arabic writing acquisition and in Morocco something's about between Tamazacht and Arabic but I'm not enough in the field at the moment so I read much more about other things not Arabic at the moment any other questions or burning comments there's one other question maybe it's a good point to conclude on can you put your very last slide your conclusions conclusions on the second so I wonder whether given as you mentioned the highly political nature of this not just in France lots of us work in countries where this is similar but also across Europe whether your last statement couldn't be a little bit stronger so however it did not propose that for the French writing either I mean actually what you have is seems to me a really impressive innovation from these young people what they know of what we have to admit is already a very complex writing system which is French it's by no means one that you can as you pointed out with your example so they've got these rules swimming around plus the Arabic which they get very little exposure to in terms of writing in terms of what was it two hours a week given that not only did it not impose but actually what they do it's really quite impressive so yeah that was a must yeah thank you on this note I should thank the speaker again for a very exciting time thank you for the discussion