The Politics of Language-in-Education in Morocco’s News Media: A Corpus-Based Comparative Framing Analysis of Morocco’s Trilingual Press (2018–2023)

الملخص

Morocco’s language-in-education policy has gone through a lengthy phase of public contestation. From the 2018 controversy over Moroccan Arabic (Darija) in primary textbooks, through the 2019 adoption of Framework Law 51.17 and its mandate of foreign-language instruction in scientific subjects, to the 2022–2026 roadmap’s strategic pivot toward English, scholarship has highlighted the legislative and pedagogical dimensions of these reforms but has paid comparatively little attention to how reform is mediated for public consumption and none to how a single reform is rendered into divergent realities across a trilingual press. This paper addresses that gap through a corpus-based comparative framing analysis of a purposive corpus of 58 Arabic, French, and English language news items spanning 2018–2023 and organized into nine policy-event blocks. The analysis draws on Entman’s framing model (1993) and Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic frames (2000), reading the results through Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1995) alongside Bourdieu’s account of linguistic capital (1991) and Phillipson’s theory of linguistic imperialism (1992). The study identifies a register-specific division of discursive labour. On one hand, there is an identity-preservation frame predominating the Arabic coverage; on the other, a technocratic/managerial frame in French coverage and then an emancipatory global-market frame in English coverage. By contrast, educational equity is structurally displaced since it surfaces chiefly in a small set of English-language international commentaries and remains marginal in the domestic registers that reach the most affected publics. The study argues that this divergence reproduces competing elite projects, and it closes with evidence-based recommendations for a more inclusive language-planning process.