Teaching interculturality through Southern multilingualisms: EFL teacher agency

Abstract

EFL occupies a paradoxical space in Morocco, tasked with teaching interculturality within language hierarchies, marginalizing local cultures and knowledge systems. This research draws on in-depth interviews and classroom observations with seventeen Moroccan EFL teachers, aiming to investigate: (1) how teachers perceive the impact of multilingual hierarchies on teaching interculturality, and (2) how they leverage multilingual resources for intercultural pedagogy. Findings reveal that: first, teachers conceptualize linguistic power relations as persistent barriers to equitable intercultural education. The dominance of English and French often (re)produces the privileging of Western Anglophone cultural content while systemically marginalizing local Amazigh and Darija knowledge systems in EFL classrooms. Second, teachers employ nuanced strategies of adaptation and subversion to navigate the Eurocentric limitations of prescribed materials. Classroom observations identified certain practices that constitute what is termed ‘critical multilingual adaptation’, as teachers use the textbook as a scaffold while simultaneously destabilizing its cultural assumptions and referencing local languages.