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This paper discusses the contributions to this special issue in the context of the African Renaissance and the subsequent need to re-define educational development from a multilingual, multicultural and pan-African perspective. Each contribution offers a different angle to the discussion: a critique of Arabization in Morocco, with questions about whether a new medium of instruction policy will prioritize people's own languages or French; an analysis of urban attitudes in Angola toward a new education policy providing for six mother tongues to be used in lower primary; a description of the challenges for stakeholders in the Seychelles to recognize that Seselwa, a creole, can be an acceptable medium of instruction; and an assessment of the opportunities and limitations in South Africa of classroom trans-languaging between African languages and English. A stronger voice needs to emerge on behalf of African languages and ways of knowing.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of "digital plagiarism" and its effects on scientific research in Moroccan universities. It subscribes itself in the recent research work that focuses on university students and Information Technology in this "soft age," if one may name it as such. Amid the catastrophic plummeting reading rates, the massive digital youth migration to and dense immersion into the e-content abyss, and the consequent extensive dependence on web-generated information without regular sound verification and/or academic documentation, this paper attempts to identify the causes of that phenomenon and specify the ways Moroccan university students, especially undergraduates, use online content relevant to doing/writing their graduation research papers.

The present paper investigates one aspect of questionable research practices relating to Arabic L1 learners of foreign languages, namely the use of statistics. The objective of the paper is to argue that reproducible research requires adopting wise practices in linguistics and that the excessive focus on quantification does not seem to serve this purpose. Statistical significance tests in quantitative research are routinely used in linguistic inquiry as well as language teaching and learning studies with a view to supporting the relevant explanatory insights in linguistics. In this article, I will expose the misuse of statistics by doctoral students in English departments of Morocco working on Arabic L1 learners' data, by highlighting some practices that are at odds with international good practices in academic research in linguistics. I will take stock of the current questionable practices in this regard to dispel some of the misunderstanding about the use of statistics which is now gaining grounds lest this becomes an orthodoxy. I will argue that research on Arabic L1 learners' data should be focused more on exploration and discovery, as well as the validation of epistemological insights than on mere descriptive quantification geared to hypothesis verification. These areas of focus constitute the crux of academic research in linguistics, but they seem to be lost in statistics in doctoral students' theses. Recommendations and solutions are provided for enhancing transparency and improving reproducibility of doctoral research outcomes to advance theory building and the delivery of new research lines in linguistics as well as to avoid the risk of research waste, in line with the requirements of open science.

Today, the power of discourse is incontestable. Within the field of language policy and planning (LPP), language policy (LP) has been conceptualized in various ways. One paradigmshifting conceptualization is viewing LP as "discourse." The discursive power of language policies is quite real as it can be contested in official state discourses about language and language-related issues. This paper employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine the macrodiscourses of crisis, quality, equity, equality, and change in Morocco's language policy. The study scrutinizes these discourses and explores their "manipulative" use in official policy texts. It contends that these macro-discourses are strategically used to rationalize the spread and strengthening of foreign languages to the detriment of national ones. Specifically, the analysis shows that crisis discourse serves as a powerful strategy to legitimize change and create a sense of urgency that often sidelines crucial questions about the nature and beneficiaries of the proposed changes. Furthermore, the discourse of quality ties educational "quality" to the mastery of foreign languages. Likewise, renovation and modernization discourses are found to align systematically with the promotion of these languages. Also, the rhetoric of equity in language-in-education policy appears to justify biased decisions that favour foreign language instruction, risking the perpetuation and exacerbation of existing educational inequities. Consequently, this study implies that more attention should be paid to the intricate dynamics of language policy, especially its discursive power, which could potentially amplify disparities in education systems instead of eliminating them.

The importance of entrepreneurship in socio-economic development is increasingly present, not only in the papers of researchers but also in the minds of policymakers. In fact, entrepreneurship education has received a lot of attention because of the role it can play in stimulating entrepreneurial intention among students. Given that the tourism and hospitality industry is the economic sector most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurship education and tourism entrepreneurial intention and reveals the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the entrepreneurial intention of students in tourism. Survey data was collected from 502 Moroccan students studying hospitality and tourism and analyzed using SEM-PLS. Our findings show a non-significant effect of entrepreneurial education on tourism entrepreneurial intention in the COVID-19 era. The results also reveal a significant negative effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the entrepreneurial intentions of students in tourism.

Model United Nations (MUN) has seen dramatic growth in Morocco, both at the university and high school levels. It is a popular and effective teaching tool. This paper aims to test its utility using various methodologies. It shares the results of surveys, both historic and current, conducted at Al Akhawayn University evaluating the activity among students. It also includes interviews with MUN participants, both coaches and students, at Al Akhawayn University and elsewhere. Finally, the paper evaluates whether the tool is trans-cultural or whether it is an expansion of White space.

As in teaching other languages, the most difficult of the four basic skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language is writing; it includes very different strategies from sequencing to analysis and synthesis. In addition, foreign language learners tend to transfer the forms and meanings of their own culture and language to the target language and culture. Transfer means mutual benefit to be taken from their mother tongue as well as the other language(s) at the students' disposal and it can be observed more in bilingual or multilingual individuals. In this sense, interfering negative transfer is a type of transfer that can exhibit itself as words, affixes/suffixes and syntax, while bilingual or multilingual individuals learn Turkish. The primary purpose of this study is to identify the mistakes caused by interfering negative transfers, show the effect of multilingualism on students, and help the instructors of Turkish as a foreign language. The study group consisted of 115 Moroccan students at the level of A1-A2 who learnt Turkish in the second and third course period of the 2021-2022 academic year at the ULUTÖMER language teaching center of Bursa Uludag University. The writing skills course papers of these students at the A1-A2 level the end-of-course exam were chosen as samples. The research model was qualitatively patterned, and the research data were obtained through document analysis. The writing skills course examples included in the study were examined using the scanning technique. As far as the goals of this study are concerned, it was found that the participant students benefited from their mother tongue as well as the other languages at their disposal in their writing skills the end-of-course exam papers. The writing skills of the end-of-course exam paper of the students were evaluated within the framework of the titles of words, affixes/suffixes and syntax. This study is significant in the sense that it reveals which languages at their disposal the Moroccan students benefit from when they use Turkish in their writing skills course. After identifying the interfering negative effects of the languages that the students knew over the target language, suggestions were offered about how to eliminate those negative effects.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have increasingly become vital in our everyday lives. Education is one of the most visible domains in which these technologies are being used. Conversational Agents (CAs) are among the most prominent AI systems for assisting teaching and learning processes. Their integration into an e-learning system can provide replies suited to each learner's specific needs, allowing them to study at their own pace. In this paper, based on recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques, we present an experimental implementation of an educational chatbot intended to instruct secondary school learners Logo, an educational programming language. The related chatbot was implemented and evaluated in Moroccan public schools with the support of teachers from the Regional Center for Education and Training Professions of Souss Massa. The experiments included 109 students grouped into three separate classes. One is a control class group that uses a traditional approach, while the other two are experimental groups that employ digital content and the chatbot-based method. Preliminary findings indicate that employing chatbots can greatly enhance student learning experiences by allowing them to study at their own speed with less stress, saving them time, and keeping them motivated. Furthermore, integrating these AI systems into a smart classroom will not only create a supportive environment by encouraging good interactions with students, it will also allow learners to be more engaged and achieve better academic objectives.

This paper discusses the insightful and illuminating findings of teaching critical reading within the theoretical framework of critical pedagogy. More specifically, this paper examines the impact of a critical-reading course on students' reading skills and beliefs about discourse production and interpretation. The course was conducted according to the principles of transformative participatory action research and, thus, a corpus of 50 essays, written by a convenience sample of 25 post-graduate students in the pre-test and post-test phases, was analyzed to examine the effect of the course on students' reading-habits and their representations of different discourses. Pretest findings showed that most students used to think that discourses are innocent and ideology-free and that reading a text consists in understanding its general idea, extracting its writer's viewpoint, making sense of its vocabulary, and paraphrasing it. As far as text's function is concerned, most students used to believe that a text's basic function is delivering information. In addition, most of them were unaware of the fact that a text has ideological and socio-political functions. Post-test findings revealed that students' discourse awareness and reading habits have become more critical and developed at two levels: the worldview level and the meta-language level. The t-test statistics suggest that there is a significant difference of p?0.001 between students' reading scores before and after the intervention. Therefore, the null hypothesis which says that there is no significant difference between studying critical reading from a critical pedagogy perspective and studying it from a functional or conventional perspective is false.

As a specific driver for the transformation of education systems in Morocco, inclusive education is a process that aims to reduce the exclusion of children with disabilities. Indeed, few studies have analysed the exclusion factors that cause children with disabilities not to pursue their education. Based on this, the present paper explores the spatial effect of factors related to accessibility and school supply. The database is from the latest national survey of the 2014 General Census of Population and Housing for the 75 provinces of Morocco. The designated age group is children aged 10-14 years. Exploratory spatial analysis has allowed us to map the hotspots of school dropout risk. The results of the spatial heterogeneity show a deficit in the distribution of accessibilities and the supply of paramedical services. From economic policy, we emphasise the need for spatial equity in the geographic distribution of inclusive education provision. The equitable distribution of psychological conditions for school retention is a straightforward factor in the success of the inclusive education model in Morocco.

Today, with the extension of learning management systems (LMSs) and the diversity of learners' needs for online learning, instructors have to be assisted to adapt their syllabus to meet learners' needs. Therefore, it is necessary to tailor course instruction to meet individual needs and determine how well they serve the learners using these online platforms. In this case, technological advances are used to enhance e-learning by personalizing the learners' learning styles. For instance, gathering traces of systemic and contextual knowledge about learners and their learning preferences contribute to the design of a meaningful learning experience for learners. Our study, based on a questionnaire and learning traces, focuses on predicting learners' styles. The Felder Silverman Learning Style Model (FSLSM), among the best models in technology-enhanced learning, was applied to run an unsupervised clustering technique to cluster learners by preference degree in terms of profile and context for sequential/global dimension of the FSLSM. This paper presents the attributes of the learning contextual data-driven model which can be auto-populated and the appropriate data source determined to fill this model. To reach our aim, the data gathered from three agronomy courses taught in winter 2018, 2019, and 2020 in an LMS at the Hassan II Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine was analyzed. This paper concludes with the results achieved during the application of the proposed method in which most learners expressed their preferences as strong, balanced, or moderate for global and sequential learning styles in a predefined learning context.

Recent studies on language acquisition and motivation have targeted Japanese language learners in a formal educational context, with less attention paid to learners who study Japanese informally. The current study aims to investigate the impact of Japanese animations in the context of informal third language acquisition. It targets the native speakers of Arabic who are interested in learning Japanese as a third language (L3), and investigates the motivations of Arab teenagers and young adults to learn Japanese. Further, the paper also focuses on examining aspects of Japanese language proficiency among teenagers and young adults, including vocabulary enhancement and grammar competence. The methodology used in the current study is twofold: an online survey questionnaire adopted from Armour and Iida (2016), followed by an engaging experiment in which participants were divided into two groups (reality anime group vs. action anime group) in order to examine the effectiveness of anime selection in boosting proficiency level. The findings of the online survey indicate that Arabic native speakers are highly motivated to learn Japanese, while the experiment results confirm that the type of anime and consistency of exposure do support the acquisition process. Further, the study concluded that consumption of anime series contributes to the learning process and facilitates learners' proficiency in general and vocabulary learning in particular. However, it remains unknown whether or not Arabic native speakers' motivations lead to their enrollment into formal Japanese foreign language education. Avenues for future research and implications are also presented toward the end of the paper.

This paper addresses the paradox of transition to online distance learning during COVID-19 pandemic in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developing countries. The systematic review methodological procedures were employed to draw some limitations and possible opportunities that may inform future practices on online distance learning. The findings reveal several limitations such as digital inequalities, lack of reliable internet access, low readiness and technological competence among instructors and students, and limited availability of digital solutions. The findings also reveal that most students faced social emotional challenges due to rapid and blind transition to online distance learning. It was concluded that most limitations were due to lack of digital culture even before the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. It is recommended that deliberate investment should be made to promote digital culture and equity. Further possible areas for research recommended in this paper include exploration of digital inclusion among marginalized groups in developing countries.

The paper mainly consisted of studying the difficulties of the distance learning applied by Moroccan Vocational Training Department. An online questionnaire was completed by 286 trainees studying in the Moroccan Specialized Institutes of Applied Technology. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), using SPSS Statistics, was conducted to analyze the pattern of relationships of model's variables. Also, the Chi-Square test of independence was used to determine if there is a significant relationship between the nominal variables. The findings revealed that many institutes' students find serious difficulties in following and understanding theirs professional training from homes. They do not attend their virtual classrooms in some distance learning's platforms such as Microsoft Teams, which need a high cost of internet connection's fees and a previous training and support program.

Modeling is a fundamental tool in the teaching and learning processes of life and earth sciences. It serves as an investigative instrument that enables students to test hypotheses and solve scientific problems. This paper presents the findings of a survey conducted among 96 Moroccan life and earth sciences teachers teaching students at the primary, junior high and high school levels. The study aims to highlight the role of modelling in life sciences instruction and explore teachers' understanding, approaches and perceptions towards models and modeling practices. A questionnaire-based methodology was employed to collect data on teachers' awareness of the significance of models in life sciences and the instructional approaches that are adopted in these models. The findings reveal Moroccan teachers' clear grasp of models' significance in teaching life sciences. Moreover, they employ similar approaches to models and modeling practices. The research highlights instructors' awareness of models' potential to increase the effectiveness and appeal of scientific instruction. It establishes modeling's pivotal role in instructing life sciences, emphasizing the need to incorporate modeling activities into the curriculum to nurture students' scientific inquiry and problem-solving skills. The study's practical implications suggest the value of training programs and professional development initiatives for teachers to promote model use in life sciences instruction. Enhancing teachers' knowledge and pedagogical strategies related to modeling can enrich science education leading to increased student engagement and achievement in the life sciences.

This paper reports on the experimentation of a collaborative learning approach in university training for a Master's degree in "Pedagogical and Multimedia Engineering". It is carried out with learner-teachers training in Instructional Design. The approach adopted focuses on the complexity of the collaborative situation, and is based on three andragogical models: shared cognition, self-directed learning and transformative learning. The aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand, to assess the relevance of a totally collaborative approach that fully integrates students into their learning. On the other hand, to design a collaborative model in the form of a grid that can be used to assess the collaborative potential of a learning situation. The indicators evoked by the collaborative groups in relation to each component of the model they developed reflect their level of appropriation of the model, and the impact of the approach on the development of skills for analyzing and designing learning situations.

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, many institutional and national governments' higher education policies have embraced neoliberal agendas that encourage the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). Due to the postcolonial struggles of the Global South, it is important to critically examine the entanglement of EMI with the cultural politics of English and the colonial relationship between the Global North and Global South. This study takes as its departure point the notion that EMI might entail linguistic governmentality in perpetuating the linguistic, cultural and epistemic superiority of Anglo-Atlantic spaces. This paper seeks to unearth and analyse the complexity of EMI teaching in the Global South, specifically in Morocco as a postcolonial context. This study draws on focus group discussions with 24 university professors to get deeper insights into their perceptions of the significance and the implications of using EMI in Moroccan universities.

This paper explores the epistemological affordances of "Islamic ethics" as alternative knowledge within intercultural education. Despite the calls for epistemological plurality in intercultural education that centre epistemologies of the South, educators may find it hard to reaffirm their situated knowledges and practices because they may have been overwhelmed by the wide endorsements of the mainstream literature. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 EFL teachers, this study aims to (a) unpack educators' perspectives around the adoption of alternative knowledges anchored in local epistemologies and sensibilities, (b) foreground educators' epistemic positioning around alternative knowledges and how they are perceived as sites for cognitive and pedagogical renewal to account for local particularities and conditions and (c) examine inter-epistemic tensions within educators' reasoning in terms of how they navigate (in)congruencies between the mainstream and Islamic philosophy at the conceptual, pedagogical and practical levels. Findings reveal that educators acknowledge the legitimacy of "Islamic ethics" and their epistemological/pedagogical significance in intercultural education. However, some factors may problematize educators' attempts at making use of "Islamic ethics" including the additional burden of reflecting alternative knowledges while attending to contextual factors (class size, the course's orientation, exams, time constraints, etc.) and the lack of sufficient training in intercultural education.

The phenomena of disabilities in the Arab world can be viewed from various perspectives, considering historical times, epistemological programmes and theoretical models. This article is a theoretical review and comparative data analysis of the problems regarding the evolution of attitudes and current concept of disability and theoretical assumptions of caring for disabled people in the Arab world. Content of the theoretical part of the paper includes reasons for caring for disabled Arabs, including: analysis of human orientation aspects, social orientation, equality of opportunity and principles of democracy orientation and human development orientation. In the second part of the article the authors discuss empirical comparative data related to disability in the Arab world as: various causes of congenital or acquired disabilities, including culturally bounded causes of disabilities in Arab world, related to marriages in close families and marriages of underage girls. The paper illustrates key aspects of conceptualization of disabilities in the Arab countries and gives comparative analysis of the latest data on the situation of children with disabilities in education sectors and adults in the labor market. This part of comparative analysis broadly refers to the primary data from the Arab countries published as research report in 2018 by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. The report is entitled "Disability in the Arab Region".

The phenomena of disabilities in the Arab world can be viewed from various perspectives, considering historical times, epistemological programmes and theoretical models. This article is a theoretical review and comparative data analysis of the problems regarding the evolution of attitudes and current concept of disability and theoretical assumptions of caring for disabled people in the Arab world. Content of the theoretical part of the paper includes reasons for caring for disabled Arabs, including: analysis of human orientation aspects, social orientation, equality of opportunity and principles of democracy orientation and human development orientation. In the second part of the article the authors discuss empirical comparative data related to disability in the Arab world as: various causes of congenital or acquired disabilities, including culturally bounded causes of disabilities in Arab world, related to marriages in close families and marriages of underage girls. The paper illustrates key aspects of conceptualization of disabilities in the Arab countries and gives comparative analysis of the latest data on the situation of children with disabilities in education sectors and adults in the labor market. This part of comparative analysis broadly refers to the primary data from the Arab countries published as research report in 2018 by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. The report is entitled "Disability in the Arab Region".

This paper set out to explore online users' perceptions, attitudes, and practices towards mis/disinformation on social networking sites and investigate how they engage with, identify, and evaluate information disorder on social networking sites. The correlation study provides empirical insights into the complex relationship between digital media literacy and online information processing. To this end, a web-based survey was administered to gauge Moroccan undergraduate students' digital media literacy skills, particularly in what regards their ability to identify and evaluate the credibility of information online. The data obtained are consistent with the hypothesis guiding this research that there is a significant relationship between digital media literacy skills (DMLS) and students' ability to identify information disorder online (IDO). Based on the empirical findings, important implications and strategies for higher education institutions are addressed to help students become more digitally media literate consumers of information.