Morocco- Group of Moroccan Students Design 'Mosaic', English Course Book

(MENAFN- Morocco World News) Agroup of Master students at Cadi Ayyad University, have 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 made by the Moroccan government on implementing English lessons in primary schools starting 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 at the University of Caddy Ayyad in Marrakech.

'Mosaic' was created on the basis of thorough scrutiny for the English course books adopted by the Moroccan schools. The study on a whole provides a critical analysis of 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, known as 'creativity'.

Creativity targets the development of children's abilities to find various solutions to a given problem, to think critically and imaginatively and to brush-up on their capacities of innovating and creating new ideas and works.

Mosaic is characterized by several creative merits. It utilises:

Audio materials for each aspect of the book.

Cultural diversity, focusing specifically 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, singing and making melodies) which are the gateway 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.

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