MUS: Yes.

INT: Of the lamb, uhmm… and what else? What else do you do?

MUS: er… you do er… couscous, you do couscous.

INT: Yes, how lovely!

MUS: The lamb over the… no, not over, on top…

INT: Yes, on top of the couscous…

MUS: Yes, yes. And eat.

INT: uhmm… very good, eating the lamb with the family…

MUS: Yes, and, with…[mumbling]

INT: And do you do anything else… on that day? Anything special?

MUS: Yes. When they give us money… sometimes give money… sometimes no.

INT: ah…

MUS: I buy. I go to a shop… or I buy a thing to eat… to play… and everything.

INT: Very good, and anything…

MUS: And I change clothes…

INT: Ah! They buy you new clothes…

Linguistic process, group C (more than three years in Catalonia)

• After 30 – 36 months in Catalonia, the vast majority of students manage to reach an acceptable level of oral proficiency in Catalan.

• The grammatical errors that still persist in group C (and not even occasionally) demonstrate the most difficult aspects of learning Catalan for Moroccan students.

  Phonological hesitation E / I, even though on occasion
  Occasional omissions of the definite article
  Confusion over the use of unstressed pronouns
  Occasional omissions of the main verb
  Verb malformation in compound tenses
  Confusion over the use of verb tenses, particularly when using the past tense instead of the hypothetical tenses: future, conditional or subjunctive.
  Mistakes in the use of subordinate clauses

• There are still lexical difficulties in low density speech (one UIR per turn of phrase).

• Explanatory strategies to resolve lexical limitations are very rarely used.

• As far as reading and writing are concerned in our sample, reaching acceptable levels in accordance with established criteria is something that is only achieved after four or five years in Catalonia.

TAJ is able to demonstrate sufficient ability when explaining a festival, as is the case with the majority of this group. He is in his sixth Primary year and has been living here for six years.

TAJ: Yes, Easter, when we finish Ramadan. (…) now… we go to where they sell the lambs, we buy the lamb and the… [indicates the throat and makes throat-cutting gesture] how do you say that? We kill it, I’m not sure how…

INT: Ah! You cut its throat.

TAJ: Yes, we cut its throat and we eat it. (…) And we buy new clothes. (…) in Morocco they do it much better, because it’s their country.

SET, on the other hand, a boy from the third course of Primary school who arrived four years ago introduces much more detail (information) on the sacrifice of the lamb:

SET: We kill it with a whatsit.

INT: And you cut its throat…

SET: But not all of it, up to here [indicates], and when the blood comes out we put water up to here (indicates the ankle) and then we inflate it (…) We inflate it so the fat doesn’t stick to the whatsit… We kill it at home.