178. Morocco''''s New Way to Teach English Proves Popular, at Least With Students docx

Morocco's New Way to Teach English Proves Popular, at Least With
Students
13 June 2006
AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away this week on Wordmaster: meet a young English
teacher from Morocco.
LAHCEN TIGHOULA: "My name is Lahcen Tighoula. I am a high
school English teacher from the south of Morocco. I am from the city
called Agadir. It's to the Atlantic coast. It's just two hundred kilometers
from Marrakech I think Marrakech, lots of people know it so it's a
beautiful city."
AA: "So tell me about developments in English teaching in Morocco."
LAHCEN TIGHOULA: "In the last three years or so there has been a
reform in Morocco, of the educational system in general. And concerning
English, now we [have] started to teach English in middle schools. That is, just after the elementary
school. Before, we just taught English in high school. So this is the first change.
"The second change is in the curriculum. Before, it was structure-based, it was just teaching grammar
and so on. Now, we include content, we teach the content through English like, for example, in our
textbooks you'll have units on citizenship, on environment, on human rights, on women in the world,
etcetera. So this is why now teachers have started to be involved in projects like tackling issues of
citizenship, issues of human rights and using them as springboards to teach English in the classroom."
AA: "How do the students like that?"
LAHCEN TIGHOULA: "Well, the students enjoy it, because these are issues that really interest them
[and] they would like to know about. Especially with the global changes now, the things I mean,
and unfortunately what happened on September the eleventh, students are preoccupied with a lot of
issues that are sometimes taboos.
"So the English classroom provides them with an opportunity to talk about this. And at the same time
they are learning English. Instead of teaching English in the traditional, boring way, you teach it
through exciting and interesting issues, and that's really a big thing. And we notice that the students in
their feedback like that and they carry out projects in their cities about these topics and issues."
AA: "So the students like it. How do the teachers like it?"
LAHCEN TIGHOULA: "Well, for the teachers, there's just a little problem. We have a problem of in-

service training. The teachers are used to the traditional way of teaching English. So just now a lot of
teachers are not yet motivated or sometimes they are not well equipped to do this, to implement the
content.
But we are trying in our association we have an association of English teachers in Morocco trying
to help teachers deal with this problem. But still the government, and the ministry, needs to do more
efforts in this way. So it has to do with teacher training, in-service teacher training. We still have a
lack in that domain."
AA: "That's common, isn't it. In other countries, too, they face the same problems when they try to
change the style of teaching English. Is there an example of a project that your students have done
where they've taken it outside the classroom?"
LAHCEN TIGHOULA: "Sure. I can assure you that at least my students have done a lot in this. And I
feel really satisfied that a lot of my students have done so much in this domain. For example, just
before I came here, three groups of students did projects in their city.
"One did it on the effect of American culture on Arab youth. And she talked about things like students'
favorite stars, students' favorite brands in terms of clothes, etcetera. And then the second part of her
project was to talk about the American culture and to try to explain the difference between American
culture and the image that we have about America in the media.
"And one other group of my students did a project in the city on the environment, how to protect the
environment in our city. They went out of the school, did interviews in Arabic first and then translated
them into English and came to the classroom and presented. And they felt very satisfied with their
work, and they encouraged them and they felt very happy that the students can really do something
with the language and in topics of interest to them that are motivating for them. And a lot of other
colleagues are doing the same thing in Morocco, although other teachers need to do the same thing,
but we feel that this is the start for more projects or more collaboration maybe."
AA: Lahcen Tighoula of Morocco was in Tampa Florida, for the convention of the international group
TESOL Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. He's been an English teacher for eight
years.
And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is and all of our
segments can be found on our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti.