multilingual learners

Embodied Creative Multimodalities for Practicing EFL Pronunciation (by Janan Chan)

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This fortnight we welcome back frequent guest blogger Janan Chan, who writes, ” I’m an incoming PhD student to the Department of Integrated Studies at McGill University. I was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Quebec, Canada, and I am currently living and teaching in Shanghai, China. From 2021-2024, I have continually modified the lesson materials provided to discuss real issues and to use language in creative, expressive and meaningful ways. My previous five BILD-LIDA blog posts explore my conflicts of identity in Shanghai; “hyper-Canadianness” in Shanghai’s Tim Hortons; cyborg relations during Shanghai’s 2022 COVID-19 lockdown; real L2 use while skateboarding; and trangressive acts of writing by internet users in China.“

This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

A comment on my teacher evaluation haunted me. While other students praised my patience or provided simple feedback like, “He’s good”, one student wrote that I “did not have enough experience” but “has potential”. I felt like I was a teenager being scolded by well-intentioned parents. The latter comment was particularly devastating because this student noticed that I was not teaching to my full potential. And they were right.  

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Linguistic Landscapes as an Activity to Support Multilingual Learners in Mainstream Classrooms (by Jennifer Burton)

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From March 17 to October 11th, 2022, the Canadian government approved 302,071[1] temporary resident applications supporting Ukrainian nationals and their family members affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These Ukrainian children and their families bring a variety of skills, resources and languages, contributing to Canada’s multiple linguistic and cultural landscape. Yet, educational institutions continue to promote monolingual ideologies and classroom practices, reinforcing a linguistic hierarchy that privileges English and French (Bale et al., forthcoming; Haque, 2012). To counter monolingual practices, educators working with multilingual learners, such as the recent Ukrainian arrivals, can engage classroom-wide activities that draw on their diverse skills, knowledge, languages, cultures, identities, and lived experiences, as these are intrinsic and important parts of their learning through an activity known as linguistic landscapes.

What are Linguistic Landscapes?

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