This is a quote from one of my courses in Fall 2020, one that has resonated with me profoundly. It’s a line that I keep hearing in my head, and a lesson that I’ll take with me beyond this course’s online classroom (thanks for that, COVID-19!). For the final course assignment, I decided to take inspiration from this quote: to create a digital collage, and to write a blog post to go with it. Through the digital collage and post, I wish to unpack this quote by asking and responding to the question: if I am a plurilingual, how so and in what ways?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
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.
I’m going to tell you a few wee stories about my journeys learning Spanish, French, Italian and a little bit of Catalan. Growing up in an impoverished neighbourhood of Glasgow, I found my escape in dreaming, in reading and in languages. They all, in some ways, opened my world and reality to something new and different. My first communicative exposure to another language, on a regular basis, other than the Gaelic spoken by my grandmother and English all around, was in Primary Five (around 8-9 years old) at St. Augustine’s Primary, Milton in 1992.
I have a question for all you language teachers out there – have you tried experimenting with translanguaging pedagogy in your classroom? How about code-meshing or code-mixing? Maybe a plurilingual approach?
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.
Alexandra Lebeau, our guest blogger for this week, is an M.A. student in the School of Education at Bishop’s University. Her research interests are in plurilingual and pluricultural competences, especially cross-language teaching and learning strategies. Working as a research assistant, she has had the privilege to connect with many immigrant students, and she hopes to further investigate how plurilingual strategies can support them in learning French. She is also interested in knowing how teachers’ attitude has a role to play in immigrant students’ social and cultural integration. For her B.A., she studied English, Japanese and Spanish, and is always looking for more language learning opportunities.
Est-ce que je suis la seule qui se considère comme une language geek? Vous savez, quelqu’un qui adore tous les aspects des langues (ou presque, moi ça dépend des langues!). Par exemple, qui a une faiblesse pour le chant des mots, un attrait pour la forme des lettres, un engouement pour les règles de grammaire, une lubie pour la poésie dans la structure des phrases et des textes, ou bien un intérêt pour les normes sociale dans les interactions? Bien que j’aie détesté l’apprentissage des langues durant aisément la moitié de ma vie, aujourd’hui je ne vois pas meilleure expression pour me décrire : je suis une language geek!
Prologue: I wrote a first draft of this blog way back when the first wave of COVID-19 hit Québec, and I (along with many of you readers, I’m sure) had suddenly found myself sitting on the couch with way too much time on my hands, with way less things on which to spend it…
