[symple_box color=”blue” text_align=”left” width=”100%” float=”none”]
Rachid Elmoutaouakel is a Master student at the faculty of Letters & Humanities in the university of Cadi Ayyad Marrakesh. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. [/symple_box]
In light of our master thesis, we, a group of Master students at Cadi Ayyad University, designed a creative English course book for the fourth grade level in public primary education. This work came as a practical reaction to the decision of the Moroccan government to start teaching English in primary schools, beginning from the fourth grade. The designing of the course book was under the supervision of Dr. Abdellah Elhaloui, a university professor and the coordinator of ‘‘Linguistics and Advanced English Studies’’ master.
‘Mosaic’ was created on the basis of thorough scrutiny for the English course books adopted by Moroccan schools. The study as a whole provides a critical analysis for these books via detecting their strengths as well as their weaknesses in order to come up with a fully-fledged course book that adopts a new and efficient approach to teaching and learning, an approach known as ‘Creativity’. Creativity targets the development of children’s abilities a) to find various solutions to a given problem, b) to think critically and imaginatively and c) to brush-up their capacities of innovating and creating new ideas and works.
‘Mosaic’ is characterized by several creative merits. It utilizes:
- Audio materials for each aspect of the book.
- Cultural diversity, focusing on the Moroccan culture.
Examples:
a) Distinct names: Amazigh (Tilila), Arab (Ahmed), Hassani (Slama), African (Mamadou) and Western (John).
b) Distinct pictures of characters: Moroccan, foreign, white, black, veiled and non-veiled.
c) Distinct pictures of other cultural aspects: Moroccan tea and bread, Tajine, pasta, pizza, Djellaba, suit, Eskimo’s house and Mr. Bean.
– Arts (e.g. drawing, acting out, singing and making melodies.) which are the gate to creating novel works.
– Hands-on activities (e.g. cutting, sticking, coloring and drawing) that have a number of benefits, including questioning things by establishing a tactile relationship with the subject matter and by accumulating an inventory that enables students to create many solutions for one problem.
