- Alison
- Angelica
- April
- Béatrice
- Ben
- Caroline D.
- Caroline R.
- Emmanouela
- Florence
- John
- Kate
- Mama
- Mehdi
- Mela
- Paul
- Rhonda
- Sunny
- Susan
Alison
Alison Crump completed her PhD in Educational Studies in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University in 2014. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language policy, multilingualism, identity theory, critical race theory, language socialization, and qualitative inquiry. She did her doctoral research with multilingual Japanese-Canadian preschoolers in Montreal, focusing on their understandings and experiences of growing up multilingual. She developed a theoretical framework, LangCrit (Critical Language and Race Theory), to explore intersections of linguistic and racial identity and how children negotiate their identities and position themselves through language in different social and language policy contexts. She also articulated a methodology for generating data with young children. Her work has been published in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, LEARNing Landscapes, Journal of Language Teaching and Learning, and Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Her publications can be found here: https://mcgill.academia.edu/AlisonCrump. She is currently the Senior Managing Editor of J-BILD, the Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity.
Read the archive of Alison’s BILD musings here!
Angelica
Angelica Galante was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and she has both Italian and Spanish heritage. Growing up, she would flexibly use Italian, Spanish and Portuguese in conversations and mixing languages has always been something natural for her.
Angelica has always been interested in learning languages but coming from a financially underprivileged family, she knew this would be a challenge. At the age of 13, however, she got her first scholarship to study English at a local private language institute. Knowing English opened several doors for her to further her studies.
She attended Universidade de São Paulo, where she took courses in Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Esperanto, and Tupi. After completing her undergraduate studies, Angelica began teaching English as a Foreign language, went back to school to study Theatre, and formed an indie rock band. After performing for a few years, Angelica felt the rock star life and acting were not for her and decided to focus on language learning and teaching.
She spent 15 years in Brazil teaching English, designing language curricula, experimenting with drama in language learning, and coordinating a language school. In 2009, Angelica moved to Canada as an international graduate student in the Applied Linguistics program at Brock University, in St. Catharines. Four years later, she became a permanent resident and moved to Toronto to pursue her PhD in language education at OISE/University of Toronto. During her graduate studies, she also taught several courses at Niagara College, George Brown College, University of Toronto, York University and Brock University. She moved to Montreal in 2018, where, after spending time as an assistant professor in Applied Linguistics at Concordia University, when she proudly became a BILD member, she took up her current faculty position at McGill University’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education.
Her hybrid and ever-changing identity has contributed to her research interests. She is particularly interested in examining the effects of plurilingual instruction on plurilingual and pluricultural competence, vocabulary learning, and identity building. In her free time, she likes to practice French, go to rock concerts, ride her bike, watch movies and play with her cat Leonard (named after Leonard Cohen).
April
April Passi is a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. She completed her MA in Second Language Education in the same department in 2015 and has worked as a research assistant for two different projects related to Indigenous language revitalization. She also teaches English as a second/subsequent language at a variety of institutions and occasionally works as a substitute teacher in Montreal’s public schools. Teaching gives her plenty of opportunities to observe the interaction between language and identity, and is also a driving force in her doctoral research. April’s doctoral work will explore Indigenous language revitalization and language policy in Canada, language teacher training, and interactions between Eurocentric and Indigenous knowledges and methodologies. Her research interests include multicultural education, Indigenous methodologies, language ideology, language teaching, and teacher training.
You can read April’s posts for BILD here!
Béatrice
Béatrice Cale is currently a PhD student in socio-linguistics, (language acquisition), in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. She continues to enjoy a lifelong love affair with language and all things linguistic.
Growing up in a multilingual immigrant home in Montréal, she would intentionally eavesdrop on her parents when they spoke in their own secret language, (Polish). They did this in order to prevent their children from knowing what they were plotting. But her parents were no match for the mighty ears of a child who wanted to understand the hidden meaning of words and worlds.
Fast forward to years of travel, teaching English in eastern Turkey, and a career as a researcher in the Department of Oncology, McGill Palliative Care Unit, a B.A. Honours Linguistics Concordia University and a M.A. Linguistics Université de Montréal, combined with research interests in immigrant language usage, diachronic linguistic change, the linguistic landscape, plurilingualism and translanguaging.
Ben
Ben Calman is a master’s student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University. His current research, supervised by Dr. Angelica Galante and Dr. Mela Sarkar, focuses on linguistic discrimination and inclusion of international students in Canadian higher education.
Ben was born in New York and spent his formative years there and in Washington D.C. He has a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He currently lives in Montreal with his wife Michelle and their cat Louise.
Caroline D.
L’intérêt de Caroline pour la sociolinguistique est né lors d’une année passée comme assistante de langue en Angleterre où elle était, après une vingtaine d’années passées en contexte monolingue, non seulement immergée dans une nouvelle langue, mais également confrontée à la perception d’autres francophones de sa propre langue.
De retour au Québec, devenue enseignante de français langue seconde, elle a obtenu sa maitrise en linguistique appliquée à l’Université Concordia. Questionnant la vision unilingue qui prévaut encore dans certains milieux d’enseignement où l’on exige que les apprenants laissent leur langue maternelle à la porte de la classe, elle a exploré l’utilisation d’une approche de comparaisons interlangagières en enseignement du français langue seconde auprès d’adultes immigrants.
Désormais doctorante en éducation à l’Université de Sherbrooke et chargée de cours au Département d’études françaises et québécoises de l’Université Bishop’s, elle poursuit ses recherches sur les approches plurilingues et les effets potentiels de leur utilisation dans des cours de français langue seconde en milieu universitaire.
Ses publications sont disponibles ici : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Caroline_Dault
Suivez-la sur Twitter ici : https://twitter.com/CarolineDault
Caroline R.
Dr. Caroline Riches is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies at McGill University. She is the Director of Teacher Education Programs & Certificates and MA programs in the department. Her research interests are in teacher education & development (Collaboration in Haitian Teacher Development: Cultivating Inclusive Action Research Practices) and bilingualism (Toward Achieving Canadian Bilingualism: Investigating Pre-service ESL and FSL Teachers’ Linguistic and Professional Identities).
Emmanouela
Emmanouela obtained her PhD from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University in 2020. She was born and raised in Greece’s capital, Athens, and has always been inspired by languages, art and literature. Before coming to Canada, she obtained her BA in Greek Philology at the University of Athens (Greece), her MSt in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford (UK), and her MSc in Language Education at the University of Edinburgh (UK). Her research interests include language learning, heritage language education, cultural contexts and learning, sociolinguistics, and identity theory. Her doctoral work will explore Greek Heritage Language teachers’ identities and educational practices. She has worked as a Greek Language teacher and an English as a Second Language teacher, and is currently working as a research assistant in a study on English-speaking history teachers, and more specifically on how they understand the Quebec/Canadian history program and teach it to help integrate their students into Quebec society. Besides teaching, studying and writing, Emmanouela loves traveling, skiing and going to good concerts!
Florence
Florence Sedaminou Muratet has a Master of Arts in anthropology (Paris X University) and a Master of Arts in Teaching French (La Réunion University). Born in France from West African parents, Florence grew up in a multicultural family where Portuguese, English, Yoruba and French were the languages that she used with her relatives. That inspired her to study anthropolinguistic. She is currently a Faculty Lecturer in the Arts Faculty’s French Language Centre and devoted educator who gained invaluable experience while working in Hong Kong, South Africa, France and India. But she is also a proud mum of two young boys who grew up in several countries, speak 3 languages and are keen to help their mum knowing more about plurilingualism and intercultural mindset.
Her research interests focus on an anthropological approach to the use of ICT in language teaching practice.
John
John Wayne N. dela Cruz was born and raised in the Philippines, and moved to Alberta, Canada 8 years ago. In that journey, he learned Tagalog, English, French, and his heritage languages Ilocano and Kapampangan. After finishing his BA (Hon) in Anthropology in 2016, he decided to teach English on the south shore of Montréal as a Language Monitor in oral conversation workshops (where, to a smaller degree, he also helped teach French to francisation students, who are fresh immigrants to Québec). He recently completed an MA in Applied Linguistics at Concordia University to further learn about the ways by which we teach and learn languages, and is now continuing in the doctoral program at McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education. As a researcher, he is interested in investigating the intersections and interactions of language (use, pedagogy, and acquisition), culture, and identity – topics that are personally relevant to him as an immigrant and language learner and teacher. Concurrently, he still works in language teaching in different capacities, as well as in research on plurilingualism and pluriculturalism.
Kate
My whole life, I’ve been trying to overcome my monolingual upbringing. I went to university hoping to parlay my slight grammar addiction into a degree in German. Along the way, I got hooked on linguistics and language teaching–and was lucky enough to pick up some Russian, too. After graduation, I spent a year on a Fulbright fellowship, teaching English at a university in northwestern Russia and eating way too many pies. I kept teaching while earning my master’s in Linguistics at Die Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. My thesis focused on how multilinguals express and process emotions in their different languages.
Back home in Kentucky, I started teaching at a refugee resettlement agency. For the first time, my classes were diverse not only linguistically and culturally, but also in terms of education level: Some of my students were seeing the inside of a classroom for the first time, while others had taught in classrooms of their own. I realized that much of what I thought I’d known about language learning was far from universal. This discovery inspired me to enroll in a PhD in Educational Studies at McGill University. My research focuses on the learning strategies of adults with limited formal education. I hope to help increase awareness of these learners’ abilities and needs, and to offer resources that leverage their strengths to learn the language they need to thrive.
Mehdi
Mehdi Babaei obtained his PhD in 2020 at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research interests include language and identity, multilingualism, critical sociolinguistics, and TESOL teacher education. He has been actively involved in three areas of teaching, research, and translation over the past few years. In his doctoral research, Mehdi was interested in exploring how multilingual immigrants with higher education qualifications perceive their language learning experiences in intercultural Québec, how they are invested in learning French and English as an additional language, what barriers they perceive, and how their new identities are constructed and negotiated through their use of multiple languages.
Mama
Mama Adobea Nii Owoo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Language & Literacies Education and Comparative, International and Development Education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her research interests include language policy, southern theory, and teacher education. Her dissertation research focuses on how teachers perceive and reconstruct language policy in implementing instructional policy for multilingual learners in Ghana. She has experience teaching languages across four continents to K-12 students and college-level students. She has taught and designed Spanish and English as foreign language courses and teaches Ga, a Ghanaian language to heritage and non-native learners. Mama holds degrees from Ohio University and the University of Ghana. She has worked as a research assistant on a large-scale ethnography of language policy investigating the interpretation of provincial policy on supporting multilingual English learners in Ontario. She is also the founder and lead researcher of Afroliteracies Foundation (AF), a Ghanaian based think tank and accelerator for African languages in education. Mama authors children’s multilingual literature under the pseudonym Naa Oyoo Owoo.
Mela
Mela Sarkar was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, to a transplanted Ukrainian-Canadian farm girl and a Bangladeshi Brahmin who had met as grad students at the University of Manitoba in 1953. They wound up settling in Toronto, where she grew up. Issues of heritage versus dominant languages, plurilingualism/ pluriculturalism, and hybrid identities were therefore inevitably woven into the fabric of everyday normal for her. She has never gotten over the frustration of not being able to understand when her parents spoke Ukrainian and Bengali to their friends and relations, and has been trying to one-up them linguistically ever since. Moving to Montreal and raising two French-English bilingual children with a Québécois de souche partner was one way of trying to deal with that frustration. As a student, Mela lived in Montreal, Paris, Nanjing and Toronto, collecting degrees from McGill (B.A. East Asian Studies, 1982) and Concordia (M.A. 1993, Ph.D. 2000). Her training in second language acquisition at Concordia under Patsy Lightbown provided a model of unparalleled doctoral supervision that she has striven to live up to ever since. Since taking up her current position at McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education in 2001, she has branched out from SLA into sociolinguistic inquiry, with a focus on empowering minority-language speakers through diversification of their communicative repertoires. She has also worked with several dozen M.A. or Ph.D. students in a supervisory or advisory committee capacity and has been immeasurably enriched thereby. In her spare time, when not volunteering on the board of Montreal’s South Asian Women’s Community Centre, she knits and quilts for her grandchildren (four or five at last count). Mela is as proud of her BILD blog posts as of her academic papers—you can browse the former here.
Paul
Paul Meighan (Miadhacháin)-Chiblow is a Gàidheal and a PhD student at McGill University. Paul grew up in Glasgow, Scotland in a socioeconomically deprived neighbourhood and attended one of the lowest ranked 300 public schools in Scotland. With the constant support of his mother, he managed to attain the best grades in his school and was awarded a Robertson Trust Scholarship to study at university. Paul moved to London, England in 2002 where he studied an undergraduate in European Studies and Spanish and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Modern Foreign Languages) at King’s College, London. He also has a Master’s in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) from Trinity Western University, Canada.
Paul has over 10 years’ experience in teaching languages (English as a Second/Foreign Language, Spanish and French) at secondary, college, and university level in the UK, Europe, Asia and North America. He speaks Spanish, French, Italian and some Japanese thanks to having had the opportunity to live and work in these countries. He now wants to reclaim and learn more Gàidhlig, his endangered mother tongue which has been disprivileged in the British sociopolitical system. In 2016, Paul moved from Scotland to Toronto, Canada with his Anishinaabe husband, who he met and married in Glasgow. He has worked as an English as a Second Language instructor at George Brown College, currently works as a TEFL teacher trainer and online curriculum developer, and has been a proud BILD member since September 2019.
Paul’s research interests stem from his experiences of the harmful impact of colonial educational systems on Indigenous and ancestral languages and cultures. His interests include heritage and decolonizing pedagogies in language education, ecological approaches in teaching methods, sustainability in education, and Indigenous language revitalization. In his spare time, Paul enjoys travelling, experiencing diverse languages and cultures, listening to synthwave 80s music while reading, and having stimulating and eye-opening conversations with his friends and family. He would like to say tapadh leibh and miigwetch to his family for all their support on this journey.
You can follow Paul on Twitter @PaulJMeighan or read his other publications on Academia.edu.
Rhonda
Rhonda Chung is a PhD candidate at Concordia University and is interested in the sound of voices, specifically the act of listening: Are listeners hearing all the voices of the target language they are learning? Or is the classroom privileging certain voices over others? What is the cumulative effect on learners’ perceptions of the target language?
As an applied critical sociophonologist, my research aims to better understand how listeners navigate a linguistic environment bursting with dialectal varieties, and how the act of consciously listening to voices can affect learner perceptions.
When she’s not leafing through books, Rhonda enjoys horror films, telling outrageous stories to family and friends, sketching landscapes for people I miss, learning from her peperomia argyreia, and listening to everything from Los Indios Tabajaras to The Misfits.
Sunny
Sunny Man Chu Lau is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada. Her interest in and advocacy for critical approaches to second language (L2) learning can be traced back to her English language experience both as a learner and as an educator in Hong Kong. Born and raised in this former British colony, since very young, she came to know and experience the hegemonic power of ESL, “English as a superior language” (Pennycook, 1998), in everyday life and how it impacted learners’ relationship with the language as well as with their life chances. One initiative she introduced to Bishop’s BA Double Major in English Second Language Teaching and Secondary Education Program was creating the course titled Critical Pedagogical Orientations to Second Language Teaching in order to promote pre-service teachers’ critical understanding of the sociopolitical dimensions in L2 education and to foster their commitment in culturally and linguistically responsive teaching.
Before coming to Bishop’s, she obtained her doctoral degree in Second Language Education from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Jim Cummins. Her doctoral thesis, “Practising critical literacy with English language learners: An integrative approach” (2010), together with her commitment to critical scholarships in language studies, won her the 2012 Founders’ Emergent Scholars Award (sponsored by the International Society for Language Studies and Language Studies Foundation). Apart from being a member of a multi-institutional research team on second language reading and writing, she is the principal investigator of two recent research projects (funded respectively by the Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada—SSHRC and Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture–FRQSC). Both projects, one at the elementary level and the other one at Cégep, examine cross-language and -curricular collaborations between English and French teachers in their employment of plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogies to facilitate students’ plurilingual competence and critical literacy engagements. As she seeks dialogic approaches to theory-building, her chief focus is on collaborative classroom research with school partners. Further, she engages in ethnographic study in order to gain insights in how language is used. To prepare teachers for diverse learners, she conducts research on culturally responsive teacher education and migrant teacher preparation and integration. She has published in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Intercultural Education, The Reading Teacher, The New Educator Journal, Journal of Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, Journal of Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, etc.
Susan
I moved frequently while growing up in the U.S. South, a region that is often viewed as being linguistically and culturally homogeneous, but which in reality hosts a rich variety of dialects, accents, and sub-cultures. When I moved to Louisiana and met people who used only Cajun (Acadian) French in their daily lives, my 9-year-old mind was blown. Today, I make my home in Montreal, and issues related to language and culture continue to amaze me. My work as a faculty member at McGill University focuses on language learning and pedagogy in content-based instructional settings such as French immersion in Canada, two-way immersion in the United States, and CLIL around the world. My specific research interests include cross-linguistic and plurilingual pedagogies, language awareness, content and language integrated instruction, and classroom language use. Current projects examine French immersion teacher education and professional development across Canada and university course instructors’ awareness of international students’ needs for language and academic literacy support.
