The teaching of English in Morocco: the place of culture

This article is the fruit of teaching English for two years in a Moroccan secondary school in the 1980s, and of attending the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English (MATE) XIIth Annual Conference in December 1991, where one of the workshops raised the issue of ELT being used as a vehicle for cultural inperialism in Morocco. Several suggestions were made for ways to contain the perceived threat from ELT to the national culture. This article considers why such situations arise, and looks at possible ways of responding to them, which I shall term ‘ESP’ and ‘nativization’, with their inherent shortcomings. I then argue for an alternative approach to the problem which makes the cultural content of foreign language learning explicit.