The impact of Arabic Diglossia on primary school pupils in Algeria

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to examine the issue of Arabic Diglossia in the Algerian primary schools, specifically, the targeting 5th grade students in the Tlemcen speech community. The focus is on the spread of cultural awareness of this phenomenon and its impact on the formal education of students. The findings reveal that the Arabic Language is used only in its written form inside the educational institutions in comparison with their dialect that considered as their mother tongue. As teachers find themselves falling into the same problem, where they use the dialectal form as a way to facilitate and simplifying those complicated terms. However, this has resulted in the preference for colloquial Arabic and the neglect of the formal Arabic. In the study utilized a mixed research design, gathering information from primary educational institutions through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including questionnaire for both teachers and students and observation checklists and interviews for teachers. This research shed light on the outcomes of this linguistic challenge faced 75 by students and that draw teachers’ and parents’ attention in order to enhance the proficiency and to promote its status inside the educational institutions.