Reflections on foreign languages in Tunisian preschools

This paper is largely inspired by the author’s five-year teaching experience within the Higher Institute for Childhood Education, at the University of Carthage, the first of its kind in North Africa. This institution stands as the chief tributary of early childhood education (ECE) practitioners in Tunisia. An appraisal of the curricular choices and professional forums under the guardianship of this institution manifestly suggests an absence of a vision based on clear objectives, together with the unavailability of a guide that schematizes the projected ECE educator’s profile. The status of foreign language (FL) education in ECE seems to reflect such lack of vision, particularly through the opacity over what and how to teach. Residues of structuralism seem to be still anchored in FL practitioners’ subconscious where the cultural constituent is fully suppressed. Equally responsible for this achievement-focused view of language is the socio-economic pressure from parents’ aspiration to have their children master languages for future vocational purposes. Curricular decisions here have been compliantly responsive to the market forces based on values of productivity, and efficiency.

As some revisions are felt to be more vital than at any time before, the awakening-to-languages approach (ALA) could serve as a pedagogical framework that offers considerable conceptual and technical substance to invigorate FL education. Accordingly, the primary role of FL practitioners is to initiate rather than to teach such languages where the ultimate objective is to promote awareness rather than acquisition, and to experience rather than learn languages. This approach emerged from the womb of political reality Europeans sensed in their own countries. Multiculturalism as a concept has developed from the mere status of a humanistic ideal to become a political reality in cities receiving scores of immigrants from different ethnicities. Engineering identities which engage the values of social harmony, empathy and tolerance of diversity is a state affair in the European and North American countries, far from being an individual enterprise based on individual’s free will to map his/her future pathway. Tunisia is unquestionably no exception, since politics has some foothold in dictating choices in terms of policy making. The difference here in contrast to European experiences, however, rests on whether Tunisian educationalists have indeed a clear vision concomitant with the drastic changes the world has been witnessing. This does not seem to be the case as curriculum development is completely decided, or at least, informed by market politics whose main objective is how to grapple with increasing unemployment. Foreign languages are, accordingly, another survival mechanism to serve the instrumental values of the market economy. Conversely, the ALA approach provides another vision of FL beyond the notions of proficiency and assimilation towards an education as a process of exploration where children actively engage in comparing, contrasting and reflecting on the cultural values in such languages.

In a widely globalized world, countries with no marked multicultural fabric, such as Tunisia, are not categorically different from European cities in so far as cross-cultural encounters are concerned. FL education being another important space for such encounters attests to the promotion of positive response patterns (e.g. social harmony, empathy and tolerance of diversity) and here lies the social accountability of FL education. Awakening children to unfamiliar languages would enable them to negotiate and procure new understandings of themselves and the world around them. Due to the lack of opportunities to experience such cross-cultural encounters, young children would typically experience the world within the boundaries of their local culture, seeing things as their culture predisposes them to see. Once aware of those boundaries, children will be able to exercise engagement of the young self with the other and gain substantial elasticity to transcend cultural boundaries (i.e., a higher readiness to mesh well with other cultural entities). Negotiators rather than receptors, they would cultivate a sense of cultural relativism – a kind of cultural immunity against any behavioural anomalies such as chauvinism and hostility to diversity. In sum, the essence of FL learning in ECE education is to prepare children to consider and problematize the narrow boundaries of their native language rather than simply treating language as another skill to master.

The feasibility of ALA in the Tunisian educational system links with issues related to the anomalies of chauvinism and fundamentalism increasingly plaguing the Tunisian collective psyche. A closer scrutiny of the ‘big picture’ in Tunisia invites the assertion that Tunisians are in the middle of two contrasting agendas, one which champions a progressive model of education for citizenship and another which promotes forms of fundamentalism and prejudice through disseminating madrassa-based models of teaching. At this point, full consideration to FL education would in part contribute to cultivating identities that see cultural diversity as inviting rather than threatening. This is possible through opening children to the possibilities of negotiating healthy flexible relationships between their cultural heritage and the other. That being said, inevitable cross-cultural encounters that yield assorted forms of collisions, overlaps and tension stipulate forms of education sustaining cultural relativism. The adoption of ALA in ECE represents a form of investment in receptive pedagogies that involve empathy, respect for differences, and a sense of belonging to both local and global citizenry.

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European research has promoted ALA via the emergence of many government-sponsored projects in the 2000s. Such projects (e.g. Evlang, FREPA and JaLing), have focused on the younger age groups, have amassed detailed materials, administered activities, provided personalized training to educators, and produced a number of evaluation reports. Framework of reference for pluralistic approaches (FREPA), being the latest of this lineage, has devoted a considerable space for ALA among other pluralistic approaches. Methodologically aligned for pedagogy of discovery rather than focused on attainment and defined outcomes, the experimental effort in these projects highlights the learning qualities of curiosity, reflection, and communication. With increasing amounts of data being collected, attention is now being channeled to making ALA more relevant to pedagogies in Tunisian pre-schools, a challenging task but one worth attempting.