Language, Power, and the Idea of Excellence: A Linguistic Ethnography of English Teaching in Beni Mellal’s CPGE Center as a Case Study

Abstract

This study examines how language functions as a medium of authority, distinction, and institutional belonging within the English classroom of a Moroccan Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Écoles (CPGE) in Beni Mellal. Situated within Morocco’s multilingual and postcolonial educational context, the article investigates how English, French, and Arabic varieties are differentially mobilized in a high-prestige and competitive academic setting where excellence is not just an evaluative ideal but a lived linguistic norm. Drawing on an eight-week linguistic ethnography with autoethnographic elements, the study analyzes classroom interaction, teacher reflection, student focus groups, written responses, and institutional documents. The analysis is informed by Bourdieu’s concepts of linguistic capital and symbolic power and by Fairclough’s critical discourse approach. The findings show that English operates as the principal language of academic legitimacy and intellectual discipline, French serves as a cognitive intermediary during moments of conceptual difficulty, and Moroccan Darija remains largely confined to affective reassurance and communicative repair. These patterned choices reveal a stratified linguistic order through which participation, confidence, and recognition are unevenly distributed. At the same time, the study demonstrates that teacher agency complicates the reproduction of these hierarchies; through adaptive multilingual practice, selective feedback, and locally designed materials, the classroom becomes not only a site where elite norms are enacted, but also one where they are negotiated. The article argues that academic excellence in CPGE is produced discursively through everyday linguistic practice and that any more equitable vision of excellence must reckon with the multilingual realities through which students learn, struggle, and claim legitimacy.