Introduction

The Kingdom of Morocco, located in the far‐northwest corner of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, is well‐known for many things internationally: for its cuisine, for its tourism and historic cities, for its dunes and oases in the south, and for the cinematic fantasy of the movie, Casablanca. But what is less well‐known but equally noteworthy is that Morocco is a nation of linguists and language‐lovers, where every schooled child learns to speak three or four languages with remarkable proficiency and those who complete secondary school learn a fourth or fifth, which is usually English (Ennaji 2013). In the eighth century CE, Arabs from the East settled in northern Morocco and brought the Arabic language to the region, teaching it as part of the conversion of the Amazigh (Berber) inhabitants to Islam. Varieties of the Amazigh language remain to this day among people who retained their original culture and customs, but a creolized version of Arabic took hold among the Arabized population, and Morocco became a multilingual nation, with Classical, and later Standard Arabic as the official, literate language of the state and of education. For the next thousand years, varieties of Amazigh, Darija (Moroccan Arabic), and Classical/Standard Arabic occupied clear, demarcated roles within Moroccan society, until 1912, when the French and Spanish, with the support of other European powers, imposed Protectorate status on the Kingdom, and established Spanish in the north and far south and French in the center of Morocco as additional languages of commerce and government (Wagner 1998).

The pattern of additive response to linguistic dominance that had developed with the Arabs of the eighth century repeated itself under the dominance of the French and Spanish in the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than replace Arabic or Amazigh varieties, French or Spanish was added to the languages that an educated, high‐status Moroccan was expected to be able to know and use in daily life. These European languages became important parts of the school curriculum and their use became requisite through the establishment of French and Spanish in the media and in business and government (Ennaji 2005). Morocco and Moroccans, whose economic and political success has always depended on trade and on Morocco's strategic position as the African and Middle Eastern nation geographically closest to the West, pragmatically embraced these European languages as key to their future in the years following independence in 1956.

By the latter half of the twentieth century, the economic and cultural power of the United States combined with the anglophone heritage of the British Empire to become ascendant in the world economy and international politics; it was therefore not surprising that the Moroccan Ministry of Education also added English (and, to a lesser extent German and Italian) to the secondary school curriculum. In the early 2000s, the policy was changed to require English in the last year of middle school, and in 2016 the policy was revised again to include the last years of primary school, although that policy has not been implemented. These policy revisions, in addition to well‐publicized on‐again off‐again attempts to require dissertations in the sciences to be written in English (in a university system in which the sciences have been taught exclusively in French for decades) have only served to amplify the importance of English in the consciousness of the nation and its youth (Arbaoui 2014). Today, Morocco has become one of the most multilingual nations on earth, where virtually everyone is expected to be fluent in Darija, Standard Arabic, and French or Spanish (and for a large portion of the population, a variety of Amazigh, which is now officially recognized and taught in some elementary schools). But the true marker of linguistic prestige for Moroccans today is fluency in English or another world language, such as German, Mandarin, or Korean.

My experience of English education in Morocco dates to 1977, as an American Peace Corps Volunteer and teacher of English to high school students in a small town in central Morocco. In the late 1970s, few people, even in areas that catered to tourists, spoke English, there was virtually no English on television or at the movies (these were mostly French or Hindi with Arabic subtitles), and the only English‐language publications were copies of the International Herald Tribune or Time and Newsweek on sale at railway newsstands in the major cities. The other English teachers at my high school and I were effectively the only source of English for our students, and I had the only (British) English textbook in the class, a worn copy of First Things First (Alexander 1967). My students did learn a substantial amount of English, but this was due more to their own initiative and diligence than my pedagogical skill. By the end of my two years there, the very best could meet me in the street and carry on a simple and limited, but somewhat fluent, conversation.

Three decades years later, in 2007–2008 I returned as a visiting professor of English at a Moroccan university and was quite astonished to meet hundreds of Moroccan undergraduate and graduate students who had very little trouble telling me in English exactly what they thought of United States foreign policy and culture in general and the Iraq War in particular (Dressman 2013). I returned for longer periods of time over three fall semesters, from 2014 to 2016 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and this time chose to work almost exclusively with first‐semester students in English programs at three public universities. Once again, I was astonished. After having received only 3–4 years of English instruction along with 40–50 students per classroom and in an academic year that is barely seven months long, the first‐semester university students I met seemed to understand everything I said even when I did not attempt to control the complexity of my speech; they could reply to complex questions and ask complex questions of their own; and they could read and participate in discussions about unedited short stories and essays in English.

The study and findings that I report in this chapter are the product of my work with first‐semester students in English programs at three Moroccan public universities, in which I tried to answer one question: Given the quantity and quality of instruction in Moroccan public schools, how do so many students manage to communicate in English so well? I knew from conversations with teachers that the English curriculum in Moroccan schools, except for two added hours of English per week in the last year of middle school, had changed very little in 35 years. What had changed, I suspected, was students' access to English outside of school through satellite television, the internet, language centers, and increased tourism, although it was not clear at the beginning of the study how much access students in fact had to these resources or how much or how well they chose to make use of them in their learning.

In phrasing my question in these terms, I do not mean to criticize the formal teaching of English in Morocco or to suggest an adversarial relationship between informal learning and classroom instruction. I only mean to note that the time and resources allowed for English instruction in Moroccan schools are limited relative to the general level of proficiency in English among Moroccan youth and, in comparison, to other nations. For example, according to the World Economic Forum, Morocco ranks first in English proficiency among MENA (Middle East and North African) nations, even higher than former British colonies and the better‐resourced countries of the Arabian Peninsula (Breene 2016). Although its ranking is considerably lower than that of most European countries, Morocco still ranks higher than East Asian countries like South Korea on recent measures of the TOEFL speaking test, where English is a national priority and students spend many hours a day studying it from the second grade onward (Educational Testing Service 2018). How, then, do Moroccan students manage to speak English so well in comparison to their more advantaged peers in other countries?

Methods

Findings

Discussion: The invisible university

One aspect of informal English language learning that quantitative analysis often does not account for is the quality of infrastructure for learning, especially with respect to digital hardware and the internet. Although in 2016 Morocco had the highest internet penetration (percent of population who are users) rate on the African continent at 57.6% (Internet Live Stats 2018), the speed and reliability of internet connections and the general quality of equipment used by learners is typically not comparable to resources in Europe or elsewhere. Fiber optic connections for the general public are virtually nonexistent, and ADSL (telephone line) connections are considered expensive for most working‐class families (who might not have a landline) and, in my experience, can also be very unreliable, which perhaps explains why so few students in this study, in comparison to other nations (see Chapters 7, 19, and 22), attributed their learning of English to playing MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role‐playing games). A few students had access at home through a modem, or stick that plugged into a computer's USB port to provide 3G mobile service. In my experience as a modem user in 2014–2015, this method was unavailable outside cities and towns and within them also unreliable, especially during peak hours from 7 p.m. to the early morning, when it was sometimes impossible to check email or text‐chat on Facebook. In 2016, 4G modems became available and were more reliable, but none of the students I interviewed claimed they used them. Most students at the time I interviewed them accessed the internet through mobile smartphones, by going to cybercafes, or by visiting cafés with free WiFi. The latter two of these options were also typically very slow and unreliable.

In addition, most of the mobile phones or laptops owned by students were used and/or out of date. Malik, a student I met in the first year of the study and became good friends with in the second year, provides a powerful example of the resourcefulness of many Moroccan students in the face of conditions that would seem overwhelming elsewhere. Malik attended the course on “Paragraph Writing” that I assisted in teaching at one of the universities in the interior of the country; he was a quiet but very focused participant in the class. He first came to my attention when he friended me on Facebook and then messaged me in the spring of 2015 to ask if I would read a paragraph he had written on his own. It was the beginning of a short story he was trying to write, and it was quite impressive, not only for the creativity of the story but for its expressiveness, range of vocabulary, and grammatical complexity. We began to chat regularly on Facebook over the spring and summer, and slowly he told me the story of his life and explained exactly how we were chatting, and why there seemed to be so many lags and delays when we talked. It was because he was communicating with me through Facebook Zero, which is a protocol arrangement between mobile phone companies and Facebook in which bandwidth charges are waived, allowing users to access a stripped‐down, text‐only version of Facebook without charge. Malik explained he could not afford to pay for a data plan for his mobile phone. He was the son of a subsistence farmer and he had grown up outside a village in the Middle Atlas Mountains in a house without running water. At age 13 he had walked 30 km to board at a middle school in a larger town and then at age 15 he walked even farther to attend a secondary school. He was living in the city by himself in an apartment that a relative owned while he attended classes at the university there.

The mobile phone that Malik was using was a vintage Blackberry‐type device with a small screen of perhaps 4 cm in diameter and a push‐button keyboard that, when I saw it, was being held together with clear plastic tape. He told me that he had scrimped and saved and had also managed to by a small tablet that had perhaps 8 GB of memory and no physical keyboard; this was how he was writing stories and assignments for his courses. Malik's story ends well: He was admitted to a select public university English program in his final undergraduate year and is now completing a master's degree in applied linguistics at the same institution. His story of success, which is Lincolnesque in both its contours and details, resembles many stories told by students, especially those who were male and from provincial towns or rural villages in the mountains or desert, and who found ways against great odds to learn English from wherever and whomever was available. It speaks to the resourcefulness, creativity, and determination that was a hallmark of nearly every student interviewed for the study.

These students' stories are important, not only because of the tribute they pay to the brilliance of Moroccan students but also because of the support they provide to understanding language acquisition in the early twenty‐first century. Although in some cases, such as Hamid's, learners seem to pick up a new language without much conscious effort, most of the students I interviewed in Morocco told stories in which they very deliberately and consciously found ways to use whatever English‐language resources were at their disposal – Facebook or Facebook Zero; YouTube; tourists; a wide variety of websites; a sibling or relative; chatrooms; dictionary apps; Google; and so on – to learn more about English in general and to answer specific questions or find the meaning of specific words, idioms, or grammatical structures they needed to know. Their strategies for learning were well‐crafted and deliberate. Many not only watched satellite television but took notes to remember words and phrases; they did not have one but two or three dictionary apps on their mobile phones, which they used to triangulate the meanings of words; and some would download the audiobook version of an English classic from YouTube, find the text‐version of the book online, and listen to the audio version to assist them in reading the printed text. Students typically described becoming “fascinated” by English at first and picking up a few words and phrases from television or the internet but then becoming more focused and serious in their learning of English from media when they began to study it formally in school. Their reported love of English and their love of studying it blurs distinctions between informal and nonformal learning as well.

In addition, the students also found ways once at university to use English‐language digital resources to coordinate their learning. Students at all three universities where I worked and at least one other routinely used Facebook pages in the way that universities themselves in North America, Europe, Australia, and East Asia use Moodle or other course management systems (CMSs) to share information about scheduling, assignments, resources, and so on. Many also reported using the internet to search for content and instruction for classes they were taking, as a way of compensating for the lack of resources at their university. Their activities were focused, deliberate, and wide ranging. It would not be an exaggeration to describe these resources functioning for them as an “invisible university” of both procedural and declarative knowledge (Ten Berge and Van Hezewijk 1999), alongside but often out of sight of instructors and administrators at the university they attended.

However, at the same time I believe it would be short‐sighted to dismiss the role of their public universities in these students' learning of English. Although a few students disparaged their experiences of formal classroom instruction in English and attributed only 5 or 10% of their learning to it, many more seemed to appreciate the complementarity of their secondary and university programs with what they were learning for themselves through television, the internet, and live contact with English speakers. They often expressed deep appreciation for a professor who was passionate about her or his subject and who seemed to go out of her or his way to be encouraging. They also nearly all had a deep, fundamental respect for scholarship and for learning, and for the struggles of their professors to have achieved the status of usted, or professor. Very few wanted to see the system dismantled or destroyed; but nearly all wished there were more resources and opportunities to learn.

Conclusion: Limitations

In summary, both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of findings from a three‐year study of how students in English programs in Moroccan public universities learn English showed that students routinely accessed resources outside classroom instruction, including a wide range of digital resources from television and the internet and live interactions with tourists and other English speakers, with formal instruction. In addition, the greater the use of informal resources students reported making, the higher their speaking scores; and the more access students had to higher quality access as indicated by their demographic status, the higher their speaking scores. Finally, students' use of a wide range of digital and other resources was coordinated, deliberate, and strategic to a degree that these resources can be said to constitute an invisible university that operated in parallel with but often out of notice of their official university programs.

As noteworthy as these findings are in many ways, in conclusion it must also be noted that there are limitations to their implications, both in terms of what can be suggested about English learning among all students in Morocco and what the findings imply about the relation of informal to formal language learning. First, the findings presented here are not generalizable to the entire population of Moroccan youth. It should also be noted that Morocco is a very multilingual culture, and just as there is an “English universe” in Morocco composed of students who gravitate toward English‐language culture, there is also an “Arabic universe” and, yes, a “French universe” composed of students who may view English with as much disdain as anglophile students view French. Nearly all the students interviewed were enrolled in English programs, which obviously skews findings for students enrolled in other language programs, the humanities, and the sciences, but also for students who are not enrolled in any university programs.

However, because of the breadth of demographic coverage of the sample and because data were collected at three universities serving a wide geographic area of the country, the findings presented here are likely to be descriptive of English students in public universities across Morocco. Moreover, in my three years at the universities I was able to meet students who were in the sciences and whose English was comparable to and sometimes better than students in English programs. At least one of the students interviewed for the study had studied Italian in secondary school rather than English, and he was rated 3 out of 4 on the TOEFL speaking rubric. This anecdotal evidence suggests that the phenomenon of informal English learning described here is broader than students who choose to study English at public universities, although how prevalent it may be needs more research.

The second and more significant limitation of the study regards the extent to which the findings presented here suggest that the effects of Moroccan students' informal learning of English surpass their formal learning, or that a curriculum that was largely digital and informal in its focus might eventually be able to replace formal classroom instruction. The reason for this is that the single definitive measure of students' success with English presented in the study was their TOEFL speaking score, based on one sample of their speaking ability in an interview. This finding demonstrates that Moroccan university students are courageous speakers of English who “go for it” when asked to perform, but the finding indicates little to nothing about their capacity to use English in other ways, particularly in more advanced academic contexts requiring them to read and write about matters beyond their own life experience.

Moroccan students struggle with literacy (Karim, Mansouri et al. 2015; Levy et al. 1995; Spratt et al. 1991). From the first semester I worked with students in classrooms, it became apparent that as eager as they were to talk in class, they were less prepared to read silently, and attendance in Paragraph Writing was half of what it was in its sister course, Reading Comprehension, because, students told me, they dreaded trying to write and avoided coming to class. When students were given a one‐page story or essay and asked to read silently, a low, humming sound was heard throughout the room, because most if not all were subvocalizing, or reading aloud under their breath, a clear sign of struggle (Gilliam et al. 2011). On a hunch, I informally began to ask each class I worked in at each university for a show of hands: How many students had read a novel in English? (Perhaps 10 hands in a class of 100 would go up); How many had read five novels in any language? (Fewer than 10 hands would rise); How many owned 10 or more books in any language? (Very few hands would show). When I told the students that my son, who was a freshman at a university in the United States at the time, had probably read a thousand books in his lifetime, students would gasp. A thousand books? How was that possible? When did he find time to do anything else?!

In the third year of the study I distributed a literacy questionnaire to students at the two interior public universities, constructed a reading comprehension test in Arabic, English, and French and gave it to several classes of students, and from these I solicited volunteers to provide writing samples in all three languages as well. Analysis of this data is ongoing as this chapter and volume go to press, but a preliminary review confirms that students reported having read only a handful of books in their lives and owning just as few books in any language; their ability to write with fluency and conventional correctness in all three languages was limited as well; and their comprehension of two relatively simple passages written in Arabic, French, and English ranged from 75% correct in Arabic to 72% in English and only 51% in French (many students did not complete the French section of the test). Review of the writing samples, in which they were asked to write a simple paragraph in response to three equivalent prompts, one for each language, paralleled the findings of the reading comprehension assessment.

The problem for university students is not illiteracy per se; students can read and write in all three languages they study in school at basic levels. The problem, rather, seems to be a lack of practice in extended reading or writing, likely due to multiple factors, including a lack of public libraries, and in schools, a lack of extended reading materials and crowded classrooms that prevent teachers from giving extended reading and writing assignments (that need to be graded). The problem may be compounded further by the fact that no one in Morocco learns to read and write in a native language, whether it is Darija or a variety of Amazigh (Maamouri 1998; Wagner 1993; Wagner et al. 1989). Instead, students first learn to read and write Standard Arabic, which is a language related to but quite distant from Darija and unrelated to Amazigh varieties at all. Extended, complex literacy tasks are avoided by students, and for this reason informal sources of learning alone are not likely to address students' problems with reading and writing.

Finally, although students in the study were quite communicative, could speak for the most part with great fluency, and could surprise and delight with unusual vocabulary and idioms they had gleaned from digital sources, they also made grammatical mistakes and lacked the capacity to talk about things outside their life experience or media. If speaking and being able to chat with others is all that is required to be considered proficient in English, then informal learning might be all that is needed; but if “correctness,” mastery of generic conventions, literacy, and the ability to use English for a variety of purposes is also included in the definition of proficiency, then it seems that systematic support for learning through planned and sequenced instruction might also be called for.

The question to be answered in future studies, then, is what combination of informal and formal education will produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of students in Morocco. It might be argued that students' current problems are in fact the result of a formal educational system that currently does not adequately develop the literacy practices of its students, but this suggests formal education needs to be reformed, not abandoned. If formal education can guarantee at least exposure to knowledge of a subject like English in a systematic and relatively comprehensive way, and informal learning provides the authenticity, pleasure, and motivation that all engaged learning requires, then perhaps a bridge can be found between the two that will support the complementarity of formal and informal modes of education. Such a bridge might be built on an extracurricular digital platform, through opportunities for students to blog and vlog – to produce the internet as much as they consume its music, video, and affordances for interaction – or perhaps through other possibilities, such as virtual book clubs, in which students read and respond to books they download online for free. A first step in that direction might be for English teachers across all levels to acknowledge the learning their students are already doing outside school and its power, and then to begin to study it themselves with their students – and to make the practices of the invisible university the model for rather than the antithesis of effective language and literacy education in Morocco and beyond.

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