الملخص الإنجليزي
Introduction
The narrow scope of education in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region
has resulted in a distorted profile in terms of students’ performance in international exams such as the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Math and Science
Study (TIMSS). Many think that this low performance is the culmination of a lack of classroom
environments, working conditions, and salaries of the different employees working in the educational field,
and other factors that make teaching and testing a heavy job burden for teachers, as well as other
stakeholders.
In the MENA region, there is a disparity between the assessment policies of the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE) and those of North Africa
(Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia). Bilingual GCC countries, for example,
have been taking the lead in trying to implement external benchmarks, ably supported by language teacher
associations and the widespread presence of textbook publication houses that sometimes organize regular
training sessions for teachers (Coombe, Davidson, Gebril, Boraie & Hidri, 2017; Davidson & Coombe,
2019). However, multilingual North African countries have been lagging because of the controversies on
education and teachers’ language assessment literacy (LAL) and their perceptions of test design, uses, and
interpretations of test scores with an unclear LAL that, in part, emanates from a linguistic conflict between
Arabic, French, and English. The bilingual and multilingual nature of the MENA context indicates that the
linguistic scene of the languages in conflict is adding a lot to a complex and intricate LAL, especially when
teachers struggle with defining the bilingual and multilingual constructs of learning, teaching, and
assessment or in being identified as using a given language. For instance, El-Kogali (2020) argues that
In the 1980s, the movement of Algerian and Tunisian public education away from instruction in
French and toward MSA resulted in greater inequality in education (elites pulled their children into
private French-speaking schools) instead of the intended increase in classical Arabic skills. (p. 26)
There are no empirical studies investigating the complex multilingual North Africa or bilingual GCC
countries and teachers’ views of LAL. Tracing back the intricacy of LAL to check whether it is about a de
facto linguistic complexity or rivalry between Arabic, French, and English remains controversial.
