Introducing The Tamazight Language In The Algerian Primary Schools; Teachers, Parents and Pupils’ Attitudes: The Case Of Amir Abdelkader and Malek Ben Nabi Schools

Abstract

Algeria's declaration of Tamazight as a co-official language in 2016 prompted a number of questions about language learning and teaching in the country. The current work has focused on the generalisation of the teaching of Tamazight throughout the national territory, as its teaching is still widely restricted to Berber-speaking areas. This study was conducted in the two primary schools of Ain Temouchent and El Malah (Amir Abdelkader, Malek Ben Nabi schools). In order to ensure accuracy, the researcher devoted this work to confirm whether they have positive or negative perspectives about this language itself, since attitudes toward a language affect attitudes toward teaching that language. It also examines the ethnic belonging, linguistic environment and the educational background of respondents to see if these last three influence parents, teachers and pupils’ attitudes on learning and teaching Tamazight in the Algerian educational system. More specifically, it aims at identifying the main factors that motivate the pupils to learn the language. Additionally, In this prospect, We used both the qualitative and the quantitative methods to gather as much data as possible in order to validate or invalidate our hypothesis. As a matter of fact, we used two questionnaires that were handed out to (50) pupils and (10) teachers in two different primary schools mentioned previously. As for the second research instrument which is the structured interview that was directed to (20) parents to help the researchers in constructing more reliable data. There are three major chapters in this dissertation. The first chapter is all about theory, it covers the country's diglossic situation and Algeria's sociolinguistic characteristics. The second chapter describes the methodology used and data collection. The third chapter is concerned with analyzing and interpreting the findings resulted from the research instruments. Finally, the results gathered from the study showed that learners and teachers’ attitudes are positive unlike parents whose attitudes were extremely negative, further, the ethnicity plays a major rule in their reactions which confirm the hypothesis of our research study.