multilingualism

Intergenerational Language Transmission and Social Identity (by Dr Ruth Kircher)

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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.

Ruth Kircher is a researcher at the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning, which is part of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, Netherlands.

When I visited Montreal for a conference fifteen years ago, it was not only love at first sight but also love at first sounds. The remarkable soundscape of the many different languages spoken in the streets of the city is very different from where I grew up: I was raised in a small town in Germany that was, and still is, almost entirely monolingual – including my parents’ household.

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Les approches plurilingues: plaidoyer aux futurs enseignants et enseignantes FLS pour trouver leur marge de manœuvre (by Dr Catherine Levasseur)

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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.

Inspirée par les billets de Caroline Dault et de Kathleen Green à propos des choix que les sociolinguistes/enseignants font dans le cadre de leur enseignement des langues secondes au Québec, je me suis demandé comment je négociais les normes et les politiques linguistiques en classe de français langue seconde (FLS), traditionnellement ancrées dans l’idéologie monolingue. Je suis sociolinguiste, enseignante de langues secondes, en plus d’agir en tant que professeure et formatrice de futurs enseignantes et enseignants de langues. J’essaie dans ma pratique d’adopter des approches plurilingues, de les appliquer en salle de classe et surtout, de convaincre de leur utilité dans les cours de français au Québec et en contexte francophone minoritaire.

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Short Reflections on Being Bilingual (by April Passi)

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Hello everyone! Like many of you, I’m just getting settled back into my life as a teacher and student after a really lovely summer. Here in Montreal, Canada, we had a lot of hot, humid and sunny days. But as I write this post out on my balcony, I’ve had to put on some warm socks and wipe the rain off of my table. Everything is cool and grey and damp; autumn is here, I think! My neighbour’s laundry is out on the line, and I wonder if it will actually dry today.

I did manage to do a bit of reading over the summer, mostly related to the social multilingual turns in the field of SLA, and to bilingual/plurilingual education. As often happens, my reading has helped me to reflect on my own life and experiences.  I travelled outside of Quebec a bit this summer, once to Toronto and once to Calgary. In Mela’s post last week, she wrote about her experience of moving from an Anglophone city to a Francophone one and the shock of experiencing a different ambient language. I experienced the reverse over the summer.

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Translanguaging for communication and identity (re)building: The story of a 74-year old Brazilian woman in Montreal (by Dr Angelica Galante)

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Angelica was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and 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. She attended Universidade de São Paulo, Brock University, and completed a PhD in language education at OISE/University of Toronto. Angelica moved to Montreal in 2018, when she accepted a position as assistant professor in Applied Linguistics at Concordia University and became a BILD member . For more about Angelica see our Active Members page.

After decades of research, the field of applied linguistics has finally recognized that languages in fact constantly and actively interact with one another, making it difficult to completely switch off one language while keeping another turned on. Continue reading →

Visiting playgrounds: blurring the boundary between private and public language practices (by Dr Catherine Levasseur)

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For a year now, my main weekend outing has been visiting playgrounds – in my Montreal neighborhood, mostly, but also in Toronto, England and Wales. What I find most interesting in playgrounds, aside from the smile it puts on my daughter’s face, are the complex family language choices and practices at play.

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