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Editorial: J-BILD and the Open Movement: A Grassroots Journal Pushes against Standardized Quality Metrics

Lauren Halcomb-Smith, Deakin University
Alison Crump, Marianopolis College
Mela Sarkar, McGill University

In this editorial, we share thoughts and commentary on how J-BILD fits within the complex and dynamic landscape of scholarly publishing. We begin with a focus on our stance on the use of particular research metrics, including acceptance rates and impact factors, before exploring how we position ourselves in relation to the Open Access movement.

We begin with some reflections from recent conversations with members of our academic community about research metrics, particularly impact factor and acceptance rates. As an editorial team, we have the pleasure of regularly participating in panel discussions about scholarly publishing at various academic conferences. We value these opportunities for open and transparent dialogue with the academic community, especially as the audience at these sessions is often largely represented by graduate students and early-career researchers for whom participation in scholarly publishing can be challenging. As such, many of the questions that we address during these sessions are about how to navigate this complex landscape. These are fascinating exchanges and highlight that the world of scholarly publishing is vast and varied. The question of where to publish, and how to get there, has many answers; it depends on what you want to say, how you want to say it, and who you want to say it to. There are also practical matters, such as how much a publication in a given journal counts on your CV. It is not only at conferences that we engage in this discussion. On occasion, we have had a J-BILD author write with a question about how we validate the quality of our journal using standardised bibliometrics, such as impact factor or acceptance rates.

These are learning moments for us in terms of how we communicate the positioning of our journal and the values we promote vis-a-vis scholarship and the production and communication of knowledge within a discourse community. We absolutely recognize that the world of academia is often defined and driven by pressures to publish in top-tiered journals. We also appreciate the pressures emerging scholars may be facing from their institutions and funding agencies, which are typically firmly rooted in the culture of quantitative bibliometrics as measures of quality and relevance. When we founded J-BILD, it was never our intention to join that particular stream of academia; rather, we intentionally positioned ourselves in critical response to the mainstream system of scholarly publishing. As such, J-BILD occupies a marginal space in the world of publishing. We are strong advocates for where we stand and what counts as scholarship in the production of knowledge. In the interest of openness and transparency, we feel it is time to be explicit with our authors and potential authors about what they can expect from us as a journal. Unlike many top-tier journals, we are a grassroots, community-operated, and volunteer-run journal. We do not have a business model nor a funding structure. We espouse a service model. We believe strongly in what we are doing. Our peer mentors and copy editors, who serve the journal and support our authors, do so because they believe in what we are doing as well. We do not have an impact factor and are not likely to go in that direction, nor do we track the acceptance rate of our manuscripts. We share concerns articulated elsewhere (e.g., Paulus et al, 2018) about the inappropriate use of bibliometrics, such as Journal Impact Factors (JIFs), to evaluate the quality of individual researchers’ work.

Acceptance rates refer to “the percentage share of formally submitted full manuscripts that end up being published in the journal in question” (Björk, 2019, p. 2). In other words, acceptance rates can signal to an author the likelihood that their manuscript will be accepted for publication in a given journal. While there is some correlation between lower acceptance rates in older and/or higher-ranking journals (Sugimoto et al (2013), it is inappropriate and problematic to assume a causal relationship between quality or prestige and acceptance rates. In other words, researchers should not assume that a journal with a lower acceptance rate is a higher quality or more prestigious journal, although some of the top-tier commercial journals may want us to do so; for example, Elsevier includes acceptance rate as one of its measures of impact (see: Biomaterials Journal Insights, Elsevier, 2023). However, drawing conclusions about a journal’s quality based on its acceptance rate is a problematic and inappropriate “proxy for perceived prestige and demand as compared to availability” (Metrics Toolkit, 2020). Acceptance rates vary drastically between disciplines, country affiliations of the editors, number of reviewers per article, and Open Access status (Sugimoto et al, 2013). To conflate acceptance rate with quality can be seen as a classic application of the scarcity principle of economics, which posits that the rarer or more difficult something is to attain, the more valuable it is perceived to be (Darity, 2022). In other words, people assume that because something is in short supply, it must be valuable. In fact, the scarcity principle is a key tool that can be leveraged to persuade consumers towards making certain choices (W.P. Carey News, 14 February, 2007). This is alarming when applied to the context of scholarly publishing because it further highlights how commercialised this space has become.

While we could estimate the percentage of manuscripts that are accepted each year for publication, the number itself would be meaningless or misunderstood, in isolation; each manuscript that we receive at J-BILD has its own unique journey. We provide feedback to all authors who submit a manuscript, regardless of how that journey unfolds. When we accept a manuscript for peer mentoring, our collaborative model of developing a piece for publishing, some manuscripts take more than a year to prepare for publication, while others get part way, and for various reasons, the process stops; other manuscripts may be ready for publication within six months or fewer. We have also published several special issues, which have altered how many manuscripts we can accept and publish in a given year. From an operational perspective, our editorial board has seen several leaves-of-absence, including three maternity leaves and a sabbatical, since starting the journal in 2017. For these reasons, we don’t set targets and each year is very different. We feel that it is important to recognize that, behind the journal website, is the work of humans in community with one another; we share this because our approach is driven by our commitment to transparency and openness. In fact, top-tiered journals could likely benefit from greater transparency, in terms of how they calculate acceptance and publication rates, and in other ways. Many of those journals remain behind expensive paywalls, which limits access.

The J-BILD model is different; we are open-source and Open Access. Open Access refers to journal articles that are free to read by anyone, rather than sitting behind paywalls that require institutional access, usually paid for by library subscriptions. There are several models to achieving Open Access; as a grassroots, not-for-profit, community-run journal, J-BILD’s approach fits best within the Diamond model of Open Access, which is free for both authors to publish in and free for readers to access (Open Access Australasia, 2021). Interested readers are encouraged to see the recent report entitled The OA Diamond Journals Study (Bosman et al, 2021) commissioned by cOAlition S, to better understand the role of Diamond Open Access journals in the academic publishing landscape.

These conversations about journal impact factors and acceptance rates are timely, with many of us in the scholarly publishing community looking ahead to International Open Access Week in October. This year’s theme is “Community over Commercialization,” intended to encourage “a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritise the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not” (International Open Access Week, 2023). In reflecting on questions about our bibliometrics, especially within the context of the theme of the upcoming Open Access week, we encourage the academic community to recognize that Open Access publishing is part of a bigger philosophical movement; the Open movement traces its roots back as far as the advent of public education in the 17th century, with significant growth in the uptake and adoption of Open education practices since the 1970s (Zawacki-Richter et al, 2020). Open can be understood as an umbrella approach, informed by the core values of transparency, collaboration, access/participation, and co-creation.

Expanding our understanding of Open as more than free-to-read journal articles is essential in the current academic climate because the landscape of Open scholarly publishing is becoming increasingly commercialised by for-profit journals, who have cunningly aligned themselves with the Open Access movement. Commercial publishers have done this by shifting paywalls, which were previously paid by libraries in the form of subscriptions, to researchers, who pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) to make their research Open Access. At the same time, federal funding agencies are recognizing the social value of research that is openly shared, by adopting policies that mandate Open Access publishing for funded research. This places authors in a difficult position, whereby the cost of Open Access is pushed onto the individual researcher who is compelled by funding requirements to publish their work in an Open Access journal. When an individual APC can run into the thousands of dollars or Euros, there are significant issues related to who can participate in the commercially driven Open Access model. And academics are pushing back; recently, the entire editorial board of NeuroImage, a top-tier neuroscience journal published by industry giant Elsevier, resigned en masse in protest against the rising cost of APCs (Fazackerley, 2023), events which were expertly explored in a recent Guardian podcast (see: Bury, 2023). These issues of access and participation underscore significant contradictions between the core values of the Open movement and the way that the commercial publishing industry has positioned itself within the movement.

Our stance on journal impact factors reflects our broader commitment to the values of the Open movement as a journal and a scholarly community. When we founded J-BILD, we were motivated by a desire to increase access to and participation in scholarly publishing. Indeed, we have shared our stance on the problematic distribution of access and power within the current model of scholarly publishing in previous editorials as well as in published works of our own (Halcomb-Smith et al, 2020). It has always been our approach to consider the concept of Open more broadly than the financial, to also include the core values of the Open movement: transparency, collaboration, access and participation, and co-creation. These values have informed our operating model at every level, positioning J-BILD as something of a fringe journal, existing in the liminal spaces between Open Access and Open Education, between publishing and pedagogy (Halcomb-Smith et al, 2020). For us, Open and the values inherent to the Open movement have informed our decision to adopt a peer-mentorship model, which is not only Open in the sense of transparency, in that authors know who is reviewing their paper, but is also Open in a broader sense: collaborative, co-creative, and accessible. We look for opportunities to actively create a supportive community of scholars.

These are big conversations that are emerging and unfolding in real time. The landscape of scholarly communication is dynamic and shifting rapidly. We look forward to opportunities “to join together, take action, and raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems” (International Open Access Week, 2023), both during and beyond Open Access Week in October.

Article Summaries

Research Studies

We lead off this issue with Willa Black and Alexandra Krasova’s study, “The story of two female native and non-native TESOL instructors: A duoethnographic look at convergent and divergent language teacher Identities.” Willa and Alexandra use art-based research techniques to explore the similarities and differences between their experiences becoming second language teachers in the United States and Russia respectively. Central to their exploration is the much-debated concept of the “native speaker.” Though the two co-authors are at the same university in Pennsylvania and have much else in common both personally and professionally, the fact remains that Black is an American native English-speaking teacher (“NEST”) and Krasova a “NNEST” (Non-Native English Second Language Teacher) whose first language is Russian. This has coloured their professional identity formation and determined much about the way they have been perceived by their colleagues and students, despite their comparable training and qualifications. Drawing on the Language Teacher Identity research tradition and on their work with art-based pedagogy, Krasova and Black craft a series of duoethnographically-grounded conversations through which the reader experiences, as it were at first hand, the differing pressures on NESTs and NNESTs in the wider international world of ESL teaching. We are taken to Mexico, Spain, South Korea and the UK, as well as to the authors’ homelands, and made to feel the continuing power of the native/non-native binary, as well as the need to resist it; this study shows us one way of doing so. To expose discrimination by naming it is to begin to break it down.

The issue continues with a valuable contribution to the body of Canadian official-language research on language identity by Nicol Garzon and Elena Nicoladis in their research report, “When linguistic identity and language choice diverge: Francophone youth in a minority setting embrace their francophonie and still prefer to speak English.” In Canada, as many J-BILD readers will know, language choice is highly politicized where the two official languages, English and French, are concerned. Although the politics of language choice tend to be more intense and more confrontational in the French-majority province of Quebec, Garzon and Nicoladis show that in English-dominant Alberta, young people from French-speaking backgrounds have fully internalized the language politics so characteristic of Canadian Francophones. The authors draw on the Language Identity literature and on “L2 Motivational Self System” theory as developed by Dörnyei and colleagues (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009) in their study of a dozen Francophone-identified adolescents in the cities of Edmonton and St. Albert. In peer interviews and focus groups, these youth discussed their use of French and their sense of belonging to Alberta’s French-speaking community. Their families’ diverse origins (Africa, the Caribbean, and others) contrast strongly with the traditional Québécois de souche background envisioned by Canada’s language policymakers; they were nevertheless all fluent and comfortable in French at home and at school. However, all these young people admitted to speaking English far more often than French in their daily lives and indeed to being more proficient in Alberta’s majority language. Garzon and Nicoladis explore the complexities and contradictions inherent in the linguistic identities of their participants, making it clear that when language policy interacts with real-life language practice, language use in minority-language communities may be far more complicated and interesting than some theories might lead one to expect.

Continuing the theme of second language teacher identity and the way it develops across different contexts, Josée Le Bouthillier and Paula Kristmanson report on their study of French second language teacher identity in the officially-bilingual Canadian province of New Brunswick (NB) in “Teacher candidates of French as a second language and the construction of a professional identity.” French-English tensions in New Brunswick differ in both kind and in degree from the summering political undercurrents that inform linguistic interaction in neighbouring Quebec; they are nevertheless present, as Le Bouthillier and Kristmanson explain in their helpful introduction to the landscape of French second language (FSL) education in New Brunswick. This is the only province in which the demand for French Immersion (FI) education has grown rapidly in the last ten years (at a rate as high as 9.6%, as opposed to less than 1% across Canada in general). The demand for FSL teachers in both French Immersion and regular programs (in NB called Intensive French, or IF) far outstrips the supply. Administrative decisions at Ministry and school board level to allow FSL teacher candidates to enter their programs with lower levels of French at the point of entry have put concomitant pressure on New Brunswick universities to increase the ways in which they support pre-service teachers, not only in improving their FSL proficiency, but also in developing their professional identities as confident FSL teachers in their practicum classrooms. Through their analysis of focus group interviews with 13 teacher candidates at the University of New Brunswick, Le Bouthillier and Kristmanson demonstrate the feasibility of offering this kind of support on both fronts, and allow us to hear the teacher candidates’ voices as they reflect on their linguistic insecurities, their relationship to the native/non-native binary, and the ways in which they are working toward mature identities as FSL teachers in this particular Canadian context. Those interested in official-language bilingualism in Canada will perceive the wide applicability to other contexts, and to the teacher identity literature generally.

A very different kind of bilingualism/biculturalism is the focus of “Chinese Student Newcomers’ Transition to a Canadian Postsecondary EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Program: Bicultural Responses and Acculturation” by Chuanmei Lin and Cameron Smith. Drawing on Lin’s master’s thesis work and on her closely related collaboration with Sylvie Roy (Lin & Roy, 2019), the authors report on the adjustment and acculturation experiences of ten international students from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course they were required to take before being allowed to embark on their regular program at the University of Calgary. Students from the PRC make up an increasing proportion of the total number of international students in Canada and face culturally specific challenges in their academic programs and in their daily lives as students. Lin’s insider status with respect to this population enabled her to draw her participants out in sensitive and insightful detail about their experiences integrating (or not) into the international graduate student community in which they found themselves after arriving in Canada. Some of these Chinese international students went to considerable length developing what Lin and Smith term “Canadian-dominant biculturalism,” in which the participants reported important processes of identity loss, transformation, and reclamation as they struggled to develop close contacts with Canadians and to acquire more idiomatic English. Others chose to remain in relative isolation, socializing mainly with other Chinese international students, although they of course did have to succeed in their university-mandated EAP program; they seem to have done so with less emotional involvement. Lin and Smith term this form of interaction with Canadian society “Chinese-dominant biculturalism,” and suggest that more attention be paid in future to the ways such students are prepared for their international experience before leaving home, as well as to the acculturation opportunities available to them in the host country after arrival.

In another research report drawing on the author’s master’s thesis work, this time at the Université de Québec à Rimouski, Samantha Van Geel takes us back to the realm of FSL teacher identity in “Les conceptions et les pratiques enseignantes inspirées du Cadre européen commun de référence d’enseignants de français langue seconde en Ontario.” As Van Geel points out, the theoretical complexity of the Cadre européen commun de référence (which we will refer to here by its English acronym, CEFR, for Common European Framework of Reference), as well as the sheer length and quantity of the documents generated around the CEFR to try to help second language teachers implement CEFR principles in their teaching, have largely prevented second language teachers in Canada from drawing on it in the manner intended by its creators twenty years ago. Van Geel set out to see what a sample of French second language (FSL) teachers in Ontario got out of the CEFR and how they used it in their teaching. The eight teachers who agreed to be interviewed all did so because they knew about the CEFR and said they had been using it for at least a year. Their professional interactions with the CEFR have been overwhelmingly positive; they use it to conceptualize, design, implement and evaluate their language teaching on many levels. The well-known evaluative component of the CEFR with its straightforward breakdown into “levels” (A1 through C2) seemed to be the easiest part of the CEFR for these teachers to relate to; some of them used only the levels, and only for evaluation. However, the many creative ways in which several of Van Geel’s teacher-participants took advantage of the vast array of CEFR-derived teaching tools and teaching concepts (such as, for example, the importance of using authentic materials in the classroom) leads Van Geel to conclude, along with the teachers, that much more effort should be given to putting teacher-friendly training sessions into place for second language teachers across Canada (and, I would venture to say, elsewhere where it is not well known). The recent publication of a supplemental volume (Council of Europe, 2020), intended to make the original CEFR document more accessible to teachers, and to lay readers generally, makes this conclusion, and this article, particularly timely.

Critical Literature Review

The critical literature review we feature in this issue, “Pluricultural perspectives on plurilingual identity: A critical intersectional literature review” by Rebecca Schmor, uses an innovative approach to extract a broad sample of 114 articles from the literature published on topics of plurilingual identity between 1995 and 2023. Schmor’s intent is to demonstrate the biases inherent in the way scholarly publishing works in this area (as, indeed, is ours in this editorial). By using a complex design to ensure that she reviewed articles across a range of languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English), geographical regions, and, to the extent possible, gender and ethnic affiliation of authors, Schmor succeeds in showing that work by scholars in “peripheral” locations and/or non-dominant languages is underrepresented in the literature on plurilingualism and identity. Her close analysis of a subset of 18 of the articles reveals that the theoretical frameworks used to understand plurilingual identity—if indeed they were used at all—were wildly divergent across her sample. This section of Schmor’s review is particularly valuable, as it will direct readers to a wide international selection of research reports they would likely not come across otherwise. Schmor points out as well that researchers in non-mainstream contexts are less likely to receive adequate funding or to find a broad readership for their work. Through her “methodology of intersectionality,” Schmor amply substantiates her opening and closing statement that “a literature review is a political act.” We concur, and would encourage J-BILD readers and authors to undertake more work along these lines.

Research Proposal

Finally in this issue, Reshara Alviarez, in “Bridging the Divide: In pursuit of access to Language Friendly education in Trinidad and Tobago,” proposes a timely and important investigation into the interaction of official language policy with actual language use by children in the educational system of Trinidad and Tobago. In North America, many of us may think of these islands as being idyllic English-speaking vacation destinations. While (British) Standard English is indeed the official language of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as being the language needed for success in the local school system, the linguistic make-up of the islands is far more complex than policy documents would suggest. Alviarez takes us on a tour through the history and geography of Trinidadian Creole, which is English-based and well-documented (Winer, 2009); the local French-based Patois; and the recent, increasingly significant arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrant and refugee families from the nearby Venezuelan mainland. She proposes a plurilingual approach to the study of Early Years classrooms, in which she will document language use patterns and attitudes among educators and families alike. The need for a more “Language-Friendly” approach to education for the children of the islands, one that will allow them to bring their entire language repertoires into the classroom, is one that readers in many other places will recognize. The study Alviarez proposes will have value far outside its local Caribbean context.

References

Björk, B-C. (2018). Acceptance rates of scholarly peer-reviewed journals: a literature survey. El profesional de la información, 28(4), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2019.jul.07

Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J., Kramer, B., Langlais, P-C., & Proudma, V. (2021). The OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Science Europe, cOAlition S. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704

cOAlition S. (2023). Plan S: Making full & immediate Open Access a reality. Retrieved June 14, 2023 from https://www.coalition-s.org

Darity, W. (2022). Alternatives to the scarcity principle. The Journal of Economic Education, 53(4), 340-347, DOI: 10.1080/00220485.2022.2111387

Dörnyei, Z. & Ushioda, E. (2009). Motivation, language identity and the L2 self. [electronic resource]. Multilingual Matters. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847691293

Bury, E. (Executive Producer). (2023, 17 May). Is it the beginning of the end for scientific publishing? [Audio podcast episode]. In Science Weekly. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2023/may/16/is-it-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-scientific-publishing-podcast

Council of Europe. (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment—Companion volume. http://www.coe.int/lang-cefr

Elsevier. (2023). Biomaterials Journal Insights. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/0142-9612/acceptance_rate

Fazackerley, A. (2023, 7 May). ‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees

Halcomb-Smith, L., Crump, A., & Sarkar, M. (2020). Publishing as pedagogy: Reflections on innovating in the ivory tower. In S. Palahicky (Ed.), Enhancing learning design for innovative teaching in higher education (pp. 57-82). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-2943-0.ch004

International Open Access Week. (2023). 2023 Theme: Community over commercialization. Retrieved 14 June, 2023, from https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme

Lin, C., & Roy, S. (2019). English learning lived experiences of Chinese student newcomers in a Canadian postsecondary EAP programme: The role of gender. The Asian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(2), 197-209.

Metrics Toolkit. (2020). Journal acceptance rate. Retrieved 14 June, 2023, from https://www.metrics-toolkit.org/metrics/journal_acceptance_rate/

Open Access Australasia. (2021). What are the different types of open access? Retrieved June 10, 2023. https://oaaustralasia.org/2021/05/25/what-are-the-different-types-of-open-access/

Paulus, F. M., Cruz, N., & Krach, S. (2018). The impact factor fallacy. Frontiers in psychology, 9(1487), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01487

Sugimoto, C., Larivière, V., Ni, C., & Cronin, B. (2013). Journal acceptance rates: A cross-disciplinary analysis of variability and relationships with journal measures. Journal of Informetrics, 7(4), 897-906. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2013.08.007

Winer, L. (2009). Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago on historical principles. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.

Zawacki-Richter, O., Conrad, D., Bozkurt, A., Aydin, C. H., Bedenlier, S., Jung, I., Stöter, J., Veletsianos, G., Blaschke, L.M., Bond, M., Broens, A., Bruhn, E., Dolch, C., Kalz, M., Kerres, M., Kondakci, Y., Marin, V., Mayrberger, K., Müskens, W., … Xiao, J. (2020). Elements of Open Education: An Invitation to Future Research. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(3), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v21i3.4659

2023 • Vol. 7(1) • 1 – 9 • ISSN 2561-7982 •

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Editorial: The Language Policy and Planning Conference before, during and “after” the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Three-year Wrap

Mela Sarkar, McGill University

With this second special issue devoted to papers that would have been presented at the LPP (“Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning”) conference 2020, had our planning process, like so much else, not been steamrollered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, we finally wave goodbye to a three-year-long engagement with LPP conference organization and J-BILD guest editorship. 

Because we had to cancel LPP2020, both the papers in this special issue were in fact presented at LPP2021, well over a year ago. That was the occasion of the first all-online edition of LPP; as readers may recall, it was all rather experimental at the time. Thankfully, LPP2021, hosted at McGill University and chaired by Amir Kalan and myself, was successful beyond our hopes, and gave us the courage to proceed with the planning of a hybrid version of the conference in 2022. We discovered in short order that planning a hybrid conference in fact means planning and putting on not one but two conferences—one all online, the other all in-person—and then also figuring out ways in which participants at each can interact in as natural a manner as possible. With the help of a large team of helpers, we managed to pull it off, as readers may see from the BILD blog post that resulted. The official conference website will remain active for the foreseeable future.

Readers interested in the future of the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference are requested to check the conference website from time to time for updates. At the moment, we are in negotiations with possible future hosts for the conference, and are reasonably certain that LPP, if it continues, will move to a biennial model. It will therefore no longer be the annual conference that many of us have known for nearly ten years. We learned a tremendous amount from three years of planning and running the conference (or not running it!), and are grateful for the extraordinarily supportive relationships with reviewers, authors, session chairs, graduate student helpers, and of course the McGill-based team—augmented by volunteers from all over the globe—that sustained us throughout. Many thanks to all for their hard work over one, two, or in some cases three full years.

Many thanks as well to J-BILD for graciously agreeing to give our LPP authors the space to publish the papers you see here, as well as the papers in the first special issue. 

Article Summaries

As in the first of these special issues, our LPP/J-BILD authors take us to corners of the world very distant from our Canadian home base as they explore questions of language policy in education.

Research Studies

In “The secret handshake of Dutch: How the Dutch have systematically denied access to their language in the Caribbean,” Terri Bakker paints a disturbing portrait of the effects of old-school colonial mentality on the education of today’s children in a part of the Dutch Antilles that may be unfamiliar to our readers. Bakker’s forthright approach to analyzing language policy in education for the islands of Saba and St. Eustatius is thought-provoking and may, it is to be hoped, lead to further inquiries into a situation that seems to be calling out for reform.

Innocent Fasse Mbouya and Alain Takam also put the case for pedagogical reform in “Towards the introduction of the teaching of technical English in technical education in Cameroon: Pre-requisites and prospects.” This window into curriculum planning in Cameroon, part of a larger project investigating the delivery of technical education in that country, will give readers valuable insight into the more pressing needs of a key educational sector in an African context where English as a language of education occupies a somewhat ambiguous status and where better policy and practices around English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is clearly much needed. Both these papers are very much policy papers, thus rounding off our engagement with our LPP authors with a good solid period.

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Vol. 6(1) Editorial

Produced from within the Pandemic: The Power of Scholarly Publishing to Help Us Weather Adversity

Mela Sarkar, McGill University

This special issue of J-BILD has been a long time in the hatching. A full two years ago, in November 2019, we were busy planning LPP2020, a conference that was to have been held in late August 2020. We were, at that time, looking at the different possible sites at or near McGill University in Montreal that helpful people had found for us. Distance from campus, capacity of rooms, availability of catering—those were the immediate concerns of myself and Angelica Galante, who was to have been conference-co-chair.

But, as readers will know, in March 2020 any possibility of holding the “Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning” conference in person at McGill receded into a distant and uncertain future, and was unceremoniously cut short before that summer, when public health directives, the McGill policies that devolved from them, and basic common sense dictated that we move the conference online—a major change that meant we had to cancel the 2020 edition of the conference, and take the time we needed to plan a completely virtual conference in 2021 instead, co-chaired by new team Mela Sarkar and Amir Kalan with the support of dozens of volunteers from BILD and from all over the world.

Over a hundred authors of abstracts for the cancelled 2020 conference were invited to defer to August 2021, which most of them did. We also invited them to send review-ready papers based on their conference abstracts to J-BILD, for consideration in a special issue devoted to papers that would have been presented at LPP2020 if we hadn’t had to cancel that year’s conference altogether.

You are reading the happy result—an unexpected piece of positive fallout from what has been a very difficult period, lasting nearly two years now, not just for us here at BILD, J-BILD and the LPP organizing team, but in fact for all of humanity. This is the fifth issue of J-BILD to appear during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. It will not be the last. But we are learning how to support each other through these pandemic times, not least through scholarly publishing as an act of collective solidarity, in the face of challenges that might once have seemed insurmountable.

When we were able to speak to LPP2021 conference attendees about J-BILD at a special online session during the conference itself, Alison Crump, J-BILD Senior Managing Editor, and Mela Sarkar, Senior Advisor, found that the LPP2021 audience was gratifyingly interested in our open-access, online approach to scholarly publishing, and to the non-anonymized peer mentor model we espouse. We are receiving more submissions than ever, as what we take to be a direct result of our newly raised profile. The journal that started as a gleam in the eye of a few members of the BILD research community back in 2017 is coming into its own.

Of the five articles in this special issue, four were also presented as conference papers at LPP2021. We are very pleased that we were able to offer all the authors accepted to the cancelled LPP2020 conference the opportunity to be published in J-BILD as well as the chance to present their work at the online conference in 2021; we are delighted that so many of them took us up on both offers, to the extent that a double special issue was warranted. The story of the would-have-been LPP2020 conference papers will therefore be continued in the next issue of J-BILD.

This issue reflects the diversity and breadth of scholarship that we feel characterize both the LPP conference and the authors and readers of J-BILD. You will read about children, adolescents, and adults grappling with complex issues of belonging, identity, and language in places as diverse as Bangladesh, Japan, Mexico, Serbia, and the Korean north-eastern part of China. The next LPP-themed issue will take you to even more corners of our unpredictable and changing world, and will come your way in 2022.

Stay safe and well until then, J-BILD readers.

ARTICLE SUMMARIES

Research Studies

Marija Apostolovic takes us into the heart of her native Serbia in “Parlers romani et romani standard à l’école : tensions entre politique officielle et politique en classe,” where we meet a classroom of children belonging to the Rom minority, and learn that they have a confident and outspoken sense of agency about the non-standard variety of the Romani language they speak, despite the presence in their classroom of a teacher and a curriculum reflecting a different, top-down view of this recently standardized language. We learn about the language-ideological debates current among Romani-speaking Serbian educators. Marija offers a detailed and sympathetic portrait of the classroom, the teachers and the children, in a context that is likely to be new to many of our readers.

In “‘Multi’ as a Strategic Tool for Better Transition: Plurilingualism at an Ethnic Korean High School in China,” Meilan Ehlert takes us to the Korean autonomous region of north-east China, where she spent four years working with high school students who move fluidly between Korean, Mandarin Chinese and English as part of their trajectory through adolescence in this plurilingual part of the world’s most populous nation. As a trilingual Korean-Chinese-English insider, Meilan is able to interpret the language choices of these youngsters with perceptive insight. Their voices come through clearly in this detailed research report of a painstaking longitudinal study.

A continuing collaboration among three scholars with close connections to Mexico, Dana K. Nelson, Jesahe Herrera Ruano and Jesús H. K. Zepeda Huerta, gives us “Linguistic Trajectories and FLP: Return Migrant Families in Mexico.” We delve into the histories and family language policies of three young people who have moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States over the course of a couple of decades; the relative importance of Spanish and English in their linguistic repertoires changes in correspondingly complex ways. The authors portray the dynamics of these three transnational families within the context of Mexico-US immigration and return migration with understanding and compassion, showing how important it is for researchers into family language policy to look at individuals and families close up and in carefully contextualized detail.

In the only article in this issue that was not, in the event, also presented as a paper at LPP2021, “Ideological formation process of a Japanese college student: A case study,” Mitsuyo Sakamoto and Mitsunori Takakuwa show us how one Japanese college student in Tokyo changed her attitudes over time, as she learned about intercultural issues and different varieties of English over the course of her university program. This in-depth case study makes it possible for readers to gain insight into the thought processes of one individual young Japanese who came a long way in her ability to see English(es) in a more nuanced, globalized context.

Critical Literature Review

Shaila Shams, in “Nation, Religion and Language Ideology: The Case of Postcolonial Bangladesh,” reviews a wide range of historical and ideological literature on the ways languages have been used and perceived in pre- and post-independence Bangladesh. From her current perspective in Vancouver, she is able to step back from her home country and inform us about current language-ideological debates, not only in Bangladesh itself but also in diasporic communities of Bangladeshis who have migrated elsewhere, especially to Canada. The situation is complex: several varieties of Bengali—including a standard literary language to which not all have access—co-exist in Bangladesh; in addition, Arabic, as the language of religion, and English, as an important language of power, both compete with Bengali in the public space, and in the hearts and on the tongues of Bangladeshis at home and abroad. Shaila navigates this terrain with ease and skill for her readers, opening a window into a fascinating sociolinguistic area that may not be as familiar to some J-BILD readers.

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Editorial 5(2): Crossing Language Ideological Divides

ALISON CRUMP, Marianopolis College and McGill University

MELA SARKAR, McGill University

LAUREN STRACHAN, Concordia University

Introduction

Dear readers, do you remember the eve of 2021? Do you remember saying goodbye to 2020, feeling a glimmer of hope for the coming year, looking forward to brighter days, in-person connections, family gatherings, and a lot less screen time? As we pass through the first half of 2021, it seems—dare we say!—that we can finally start to look to the future with some optimism as we transition to non-pandemic life; at least in Montreal, where we are writing from.

And yet, for educators and scholars of critical sociolinguistics and applied linguistics in Montreal, the recent announcement of Bill 96, “An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec,” evokes a sense of moving back in time. This proposed legislation, if passed, will have wide-ranging impacts on almost every sector of Quebec society. With respect to language and education in Québec, Bill 96 pushes against what our scholarly community has been advocating through research, policy, and practice for decades. For instance, we take as foundational that:

  • the world is more multilingual than monolingual (e.g., Blackledge & Creese, 2010);
  • multilingualism is good for the brain (e.g., Bialystok, 2009; Grosjean, 1982);
  • Montreal is the city in North America with the highest rate of trilingualism (French, English, and one or more other languages) (e.g., Lamarre, 2003);
  • newcomer integration into a host society is best supported through additive, not subtractive, educational approaches to language (e.g., Allen, 2006; Cummins, 2009; Garcia, 2009; Genesee, 1989; Hornberger, 2003);
  • denying language choice can negatively impact individuals’ identity and sense of belonging (e.g., Fishman, 1972; Rampton, 1985; Schecter & Cummins, 2003).

That’s the backdrop. Against that backdrop, through decades of research and educational policies and practices, we have carved out spaces—both ideological and physical—to integrate plurilingual perspectives. Now, squarely in the foreground, those spaces stand to be narrowed by Bill 96.

Support for French in Quebec need not be either-or, but rather both-and. We can maintain French as a strong langue publique commune AND celebrate the plurilingualism that is lived in Montreal. Such perspectives on belonging, identity, language, and diversity need to be voiced in public spaces. J-BILD is one such public space; the articles in this current issue are, we feel, particularly good examples of the voices we are glad to help be heard.

The upcoming Language Policy and Planning (LPP) conference (August, 2021), hosted by McGill University with the support of the BILD Research Group, is another such space. The conference is a timely forum that enters multidisciplinary approaches to LPP in Montreal into dialogue with an international audience. The relevance, in terms of timing and location, of this year’s conference is not lost on us: Coming as it does just a few months after the announcement of Bill 96, this conference is well-poised to stimulate debate and discussion around issues of language planning and policy in this very real local context, one which many conference attendees—not to mention all its organizers—care about deeply. The next two J-BILD issues will be special issues featuring publications from the LPP conference, and will serve to ensure that discussions emerging from the conference find their way into public spaces and discourse. How else can we keep working to cross ideological divides?

We want to applaud the ongoing work of the BILD research group, a close cousin to J-BILD. BILD has been publishing weekly blog posts since 2014. Mela Sarkar’s inaugural BILD blog post (November 17, 2014) launched the blog as a public forum for sharing research that directly relates to Montréal’s complex sociolinguistic dynamic. In reference to the notion of “bilingualism as a first language” (Swain, 1972)—a notion deeply ingrained in our language ideologies, our research methodologies, and our practices as educators—Mela asked, “What will happen, what is happening, when this way of using language collides head-on with the approved and authorized boundaries schools are mandated to enforce?” This question could not be more relevant in 2021.

Before we introduce the articles in this summer issue of J-BILD, we’d like to introduce our co-author, Lauren Strachan, the newest member of the J-BILD editorial team. Lauren S. has worked with J-BILD as a dedicated copy editor since our early days. In that role, she has been a key contributor to many issues of the journal. This year, we have welcomed Lauren S. to the team as our Senior Copy Editor. With Lauren Halcomb-Smith, J-BILD’s co-founder and Managing Editor, currently on maternity leave, Lauren S. could not have taken on this role at a better time. And, this gives us the chance to shine a light on the essential, yet often underappreciated, work of copy editors in academic publishing. J-BILD copy editors, like our peer mentors, work collaboratively and directly with authors to bring their manuscripts to their final publication-ready state. This is the last stage in the publication process and comes after the peer mentor has recommended the manuscript to proceed. Copy editors have a unique skill set; they empathize with the writer while advocating for the reader; they have a deep understanding of writing and genre conventions, of coherence and cohesion, and a nit-picking attention to detail. Their work brings forward the voices of the authors, sharpens their arguments, and invites the reader into the discussion. As Senior Copy Editor, Lauren S. has grown our pool of J-BILD copy editors, aligned the journal with APA’s recent 7th edition, masterfully ensured timelines were met, and embraced J-BILD’s vision and core principles of open scholarship. Thank you, Lauren!

Article Summaries

Research Studies

Francis Bangou, Carole Fleuret, Marie-Philip Mathieu, and Bianca Jeanveaux’s article “Promoting inclusive plurilingual practices in Ontario’s francophone elementary schools: The experiences of principals and teachers,” presents the results of a study that documented the ways principals and teachers viewed and addressed the linguistic diversity of students enrolled in the Actualisation linguistique en français (ALF) program. Using data from semi-structured interviews conducted with five principals and 11 teachers affiliated with the ALF program, the authors show that allophone students’ first languages remain relatively marginal within the participating schools. While the article highlights the need for ALF-specific training and the adaptation of teaching practices, it also finds that there are signs of some change in terms of inclusion of plurilingual teaching and learning practices.

Jessica Chandras’ article “Student identity in the Indian university: Language and educational stereotypes in higher education,” explores how language ideologies and the use of different languages in colleges and universities in Pune, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, create ways to categorize and stereotype student identities based on language proficiency, caste, rurality, and religious background. Through ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods of participant observations and interviews at two prestigious Pune higher education institutions, Jessica describes multilingual classroom discourse, and perceptions and reflections on language use. She demonstrates how multilingual education addresses diversity and inclusion in theory, but in practice, many students confront additional obstacles through language policies. The article concludes that teachers need to be aware of how their perceptions of student linguistic identities affect pedagogy.

Critical Literature Review

In Wei Liu and David Rathbone’s article “The complexity of international student identity,” the authors review literature on Complexity Theory and present this as a fruitful theoretical lens to examine cross-cultural identity construction of international students. From this theoretical lens, the authors argue that international student identity should be seen as an open system that is fluid and emergent in nature, and educators should contribute to an additive international student identity that embraces multiple languages and cultures. A perpetual state of discomfort due to the development of a narrative identity should be encouraged as a cross-cultural strategy conducive to international students’ continuous learning.

Book Review

Irena Grigoriyan’s review of Mana Kia’s (2020) Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, begins with a succinct summary of the book. She uses the lens of the core signifier of being Persian – adab – “a proper aesthetic and ethical form of thinking, speaking, and acting, and thus of perceiving, desiring, and experiencing” (Grigoriyan – this issue), to frame her assessment of the book, concluding that “The book itself is a beautiful ode to symbiosis, lineage and learning in the making of a cultural self.”

References

Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(1), 3-11.

Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2010). Multilingualism: A critical perspective. Continuum.

Cummins, J. (2009). Multilingualism in the English-language classroom: Pedagogical considerations. Symposium: Imagining multilingual TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 43(2), 317–321.

Fishman, J. (1972). The relationship between micro- and macro-sociolinguistics in the study of who speaks what language to whom and when. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 15–32). New York: Penguin Books.

García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16(1), 161–179.

Grosjean, F. (1982). Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Harvard University Press.

Hornberger, N. H. (2003). Continua of biliteracy: An ecological framework for educational policy, research, and practice in multilingual settings. Multilingual Matters.

Lamarre, P. (2003). Growing up trilingual in Montreal: Perceptions of college students. In R. Bayley & S. Schecter (Eds.), Language socialization in bilingual and multilingual societies (pp. 62–80). Multilingual Matters.

Oakes, L., & Warren, J. (2007). Language, citizenship and identity in Quebec. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. Longman.

Schecter, S. & Cummins, J. (Eds.) (2003). Multilingual education in practice: Using diversity as a resource. Heinemann.

Swain, M. (1972). Bilingualism as a first language. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California at Irvine.

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Editorial 3(1): Behind the Scenes at J-BILD

ALISON CRUMP, Marianopolis College and McGill University

LAUREN HALCOMB-SMITH, Royal Roads College

MELA SARKAR, McGill University

The publication of this issue marks J-BILD’s third year in press and our fourth issue. Over the last several years we have been working out how to run a journal. What is our vision for the journal? Where do we fit within the landscape of scholarly publishing? Is it where we want to fit? How do we create our own space while staying true to the values and ideals of scholarship as “making knowledge together” (Paré, 2016)? What kind of work do editors, authors, peer mentors, copy-editors, and readers have to do together to make that space?

We have touched on these questions in previous editorials; in Volume 1(1), we focused on J-BILD’s guiding principles as an open-source, collaborative peer-mentoring journal, inclusive of all stages of the publication cycle. In Volume 2(1), we went further in describing our approach to open scholarship and collaborative peer review. In Volume 2(2), we made a case for publishing as an act of hope and defiance against intolerance. It is evident from our past editorials, as well as our published articles, that J-BILD is a journal that invites members of the scholarly community to revisit assumptions, both about the field of inquiry and about the nature of scholarly publishing. 

J-BILD represents a new model of academic publishing, in contrast to the traditional publishing house of yore. Picture academics (white men, mostly), hunched over oak desks, clouds of cigar smoke hanging in the air, the clink of ice cubes in a freshly poured tumbler of whisky. There are piles of papers precariously balanced everywhere. Young women rush back and forth with proofs needing editorial approval (by men— “Miss, take this and type it up for 4pm, would you?”) And the sound of the typewriter. Click clack. Click clack. Click. Ding! Busy women, averaging 90 words per minute. 

Professional women in 2019 are no less busy than their foremothers. But it’s a different kind of busy. The accident of history that has meant that J-BILD’s editorial team is made up of women has had the effect of making us reflect on ways in which academia may be changing. Women are no longer relegated to minor secretarial or other essentially menial functions in the world of intellectual work. Mothers who are professionals and scholars are no longer swimming against the current. 

For the three of us, our development in these domains—the personal, professional, and academic–has happened concurrently. Our graduate work coincided with the birth of our children, and so our scholarly work has always been interwoven with the dailiness of our lives. Ding! Another email comes in. Waah! The baby’s woken up. Reach for the (baby) bottle. We have perfected the art of nursing whilst editing articles, annotating bibliographies, and debunking outmoded theories. Since launching J-BILD in 2017, our senior editorial team has welcomed two babies and a fifth grandbaby, two career changes, one cross-country move, a wedding, and more. Rather than seek to keep these parts of our identities separate and siloed, we draw strength and inspiration from our family lives for our professional and scholarly work, and vice versa. There have been many J-BILD meetings that have taken place over Skype while one of us breastfeeds an infant or plays with a toddler or knits something special for a cherished grandchild. We fit in emails to our authors during lunch breaks at our day jobs, write editorials while babies nap, and review manuscripts while the dishwasher runs in the background after bedtime. 

If scholarship is making knowledge together, then the kind of knowledge we create together depends on the kinds of relationships we bring to and create through our scholarly work. J-BILD is built on a supportive, community-based model where members are not excluded from publishing based on certain norms of merit (title, academic experience, research output, etc.). J-BILD authors actively take part in a collaborative review process with a peer mentor—the process is transparent and includes authors in every phase of the publication process. The relationships that are built throughout this process are no less important than the product, i.e., the journal issue. We are encouraged that this model seems to be resonating with our authors and mentors. As one of our authors wrote to us recently: “[My peer mentor] has been an amazing support throughout this process. I keep telling my fellow graduate students that it is possible to have a positive review experience and am encouraging them to look into J-BILD! I sincerely hope this collaborative approach can be taken up by other journals, as it has been so helpful to me as a junior scholar.” 

This issue is perhaps the most representative of our lives behind the scenes of J-BILD. In January 2019, we received 11 submissions for this current issue. With our hands full of babies and older children, juggling mothering and careers and families, we found ourselves rushing to keep up with our own self-imposed tight timelines for the journal (i.e., moving from submission to publication in less than half a year). And by acting in haste, we found we were losing the sense of connection, the relationships with our authors, with our peer mentors, and even with each other. To foster the community-building that is at the heart of J-BILD, we needed to allow more time to mull, to ponder, to read, to write, to reflect, and to connect. In our opening paragraph above, we asked, how do we create our own space while staying true to the values and ideals of scholarship as “making knowledge together” (Paré, 2016)? The answer is: by slowing down and managing expectations—our own and others’. 

We have a number of manuscripts in process and look forward to publishing them in due time. For this issue, we are very pleased to present two articles that we judged were valuable contributions to perspectives on diversity in education in contemporary Canadian contexts. Each is from a different stage of the research cycle, namely, a critical literature review and a research study. 

Isabelle Côté is the author of “Regard croisé sur l’intégration des perspectives autochtones dans les recherches menées en français au Canada”, a critical literature review of research related to the integration of Indigenous perspectives into teacher education and K-12 programs in British Columbia. Through her discussion and interpretation of Canadian-based research, Côté reveals a number of challenges and successes found in integrating the perspectives of Indigenous people. 

“‘How am I supposed to teach them French when they can’t even speak English?’: Unpacking the myth of English proficiency as a prerequisite for French immersion” is a recent research study by Stephen Davis. In this article, Davis explores the beliefs of French immersion teachers about Allophones in French immersion in Saskatoon. He frames his study within the sociolinguistic landscape of Canada and Saskatchewan, highlighting the problematic nature of the Anglophone-Francophone binary within conversations around language and education, which essentially exclude citizens who speak a first language other than French or English. Davis presents and interprets the data generated through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with French immersion teachers to reveal how French immersion teachers perceive the suitability of French immersion for Allophone students in Saskatoon, as well as how these teachers perceive English proficiency as a determinant of success. Davis concludes with practical recommendations for school boards and a call for further research about Allophone learners in French immersion programs. 

REFERENCES

Paré, A. (2016, April 17). Making knowledge together: Voice, identity, agency, and communal effort [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://bild-lida.ca/blog/uncategorized/making-knowledge-together-voice-identity-agency-and-communal-effort-by-dr-anthony-pare

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Editorial 2(2): BILDing Optimism in Uncertain Times

Volume 2(2): 2018

ALISON CRUMP (Senior Managing Editor), Marianopolis College

LAUREN HALCOMB-SMITH (Managing Editor), Royal Roads University

MELA SARKAR (Senior Advisory), McGill University

Introduction

This issue, our third since we launched the journal, marks an important milestone: J-BILD has now had a first birthday. Even the longest-running and most highly-respected journals had once to make it past their first year. In Canada, applied linguists can reflect with pride on the continuing success of the Canadian Modern Language Review / Revue Canadienne des langues vivantes, which will celebrate its 75th year in 2019. The CMLR/RCLV began as a modest publication of the Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association in 1944, a year in which the fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics had yet to be mapped out; a year in which the fields most in the minds of our forebears were the battlefields of Europe and East Asia. In a similar vein, many readers will know that the Modern Language Journal, another top-ranked periodical for those of us interested in language learning/use, passed its centenary in 2016. We need not remind readers of the conflagration that was raging in 1916.

Launching a new scholarly journal several years into a terrible international conflict, the end or outcome of which could not with any certainty be foreseen, must have seemed dangerously optimistic to the point of foolhardiness in 1916 or 1944. Yet a few courageous scholars dared to do it. Now, as J-BILD moves into its second year, climate change is probably the gravest looming threat to the continued happiness and safety of not only our own species, but of all our co-inhabitants of the planet whether animal or vegetable. Right-wing governments dedicated, among other things, to the denial of this huge potential for global disaster are coming into power in one place after another.

Americans are emerging from midterm elections in the Trump presidency, an era in North American and global politics that, if we and the planet get past it, will be remembered as significant. A majority of Brazil’s 200-million-plus people recently made an extreme rightist their president. And in Quebec, where J-BILD got its start a year ago, a right-of-centre and relative newcomer to politics swept a new political party to power a few weeks ago. One of the planks in the new party’s platform was a promise to reduce immigration. A deep fear of the “Other” seems to be one of the main drivers of mainstream politics across national boundaries, and at the same time, more and more people are being forced to flee their homelands and cross those boundaries in search of a safe haven.

So, while the team of determined volunteers who launched J-BILD a year ago are blessedly spared the tribulations experienced by citizens of warring nations, we still, with our readers, confront serious challenges to our collective well-being. Not the least of them is the current backlash against diversity (the “D” of BILD), as insidious and in its own way as dangerous as the climate changes that are sweeping the world. A new journal that builds on the bedrock of diversity as an inherent value is, we think, worth supporting and persevering with as never before. Even supposedly innocuous Canadian pro-multiculturalist preaching, though on the surface opposed to the right-wing ideal of a safe homogeneity, conceals an inner denial of the everyday reality of diversity. At the federal level, people who identify as members of communities other than White Anglophone or White Francophone are lumped into cultural groups whose languages are not recognized, yet who are celebrated for the “diversity” they bring to the Canadian cultural mosaic—an intolerance-masking language of which scholars like Sara Ahmed (2007) are heavily critical. This kind of discourse locates diversity in the bodies of Others and insulates the invisible majority against any real engagement with difference. In her critique of institutional policies on diversity and equity, Ahmed argued, “you end up doing the document rather than doing the doing” needed for meaningful change.

Language, the “L” of BILD, is no less important; like critical sociolinguist Monica Heller (2007), we see language/s as socially distributed through historical, political, and economic processes that inform what resources are assigned what value, by whom, and with what consequences. The value thus assigned goes far beyond the purely linguistic. In our era, language is one of the most ubiquitous scapegoats for ancient enmities that have more to do with scarce resources among feuding families than with speech. Language is rooted in, while also helping to define, identity, the “I” of BILD. As Norton (2000) has pointed out, identity references the desire for recognition, affiliation, and security—all of them necessary for physical and psychological well-being. Affiliation, appartenance, belonging—the “B” of BILD—bring us back around to where we began, with the defense of diversity and an insistence upon inclusion. The “Other” is by definition the person who does not belong.

But we are all the Other. We can only belong by virtue of renouncing simplistic notions of belonging. The identity we may thus win through to transcends, while encompassing, the individual. We take our stand with Hugo of St-Victor, the 12th-century monk Edward Said was fond of quoting: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” (Said, 2000, p. 185). Finding a contemporary idiom for truths that go back to medieval times and forward into an uncertain, but certainly diverse, future—there in a nutshell is one of the main leitmotifs of J-BILD.

In This Issue

We are thrilled to be able to share six research articles, four in English and two in French, which in different, but interrelated ways, examine intersections of the four pillars of J-BILD, and thus contribute important voices to BILDing optimism in these uncertain times.

Marie-Pier Bastien, author of “Pratiques de littératie familiales d’élèves hispanophone,” presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the family language practices of ten students enrolled in French schools in the Outaouais region for whom Spanish is the family language. Beginning with an exploration of the unique sociolinguistic context of the Outaouais region, Bastien presents and discusses the data generated through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Her analysis paints a rich picture of the family language practices of her participants and highlights the unique ways in which family language practices manifest among young people in multilingual environments. Bastien concludes with recommendations for supporting such students in their development as multilingual individuals.

Alison Crump’s article, “Thinning the classroom walls: Graduate student perspectives on blogging as pedagogy,” brings to light the views and experiences of graduate students a sociolinguistics and language education course in their use of blogging as a pedagogical tool. Crump presents and discusses data generated through focus groups and surveys to show how the use of blogging supported students in their learning through the cultivation of peer support, collaboration, self-reflection, and authenticity in the experience of writing for a “real” audience. Crump argues that open pedagogies, such a blogging, thin the classroom walls and create opportunities for publicly-engaged and networked scholarship.

Eun-ji Amy Kim, S. J. Adrienna Joyce, Annie Desjardins, and Yuwen Zhang’s article, “Speaking to our minds, hearts, and hands: A cogenerative inquiry on learning through an interdisciplinary land-based course,” reflect on their settler/visitor learning/teaching experiences in a land-based, interdisciplinary Indigenous field course in Kahnawá:ke. Their article takes the form of a metalogue, a method for engaging in dialogues both with theories and self-reflexivity and draws out the diversity of the co-authors’ different learning paths. Common throughout the article, is an emphasis on building relationships based on collaboration; indeed, the authors argue, this is the real work of achieving the calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Accord on Indigenous Education. Kim and company bring their metalogue to a close with a series of recommendations for universities, instructors, and students for future land-based interdisciplinary courses.

In “Reframing FSL teacher learning: Small stories of (re)professionalization and identity formation,” Mimi Masson presents the results of a case study of two French as a second language (FSL) teachers and the factors that informed their professional identity. Through the analysis and discussion of narrative data, Masson argues that participants’ successful identity-formation was closely linked to their feelings of being validated and supported by their respective communities. Masson concludes with recommendations for addressing FSL teacher attrition and retention.

Sylvie Roy and Julie Byrd-Clark’s article, “Les identités multiples des jeunes Canadiens,” reflects on the importance of examining former and current discourses on linguistic and cultural competencies in considering the future of young people’s multiple identities. The authors draw upon ethnographic and sociolinguistic data that they gathered in Francophone and French immersion schools in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario. The youth in their studies do not see their identities as fixed but as continuously changing, yet they are deeply concerned with how others see them. The authors emphasize the importance of recognizing the linguistic and cultural repertoires of young people who are living in diverse contexts in order to foster greater inclusion in and belonging to Canadian communities.

In their article, “Supporting reconnecting immigrant families with English Language Learners in rural schools: An exploratory study,” co-authors Gregory Tweedie, Anja Dressler, and Cora-Leah Schmitt focus on how Filipino secondary school immigrant students in Alberta acculturate and develop a sense of belonging when language and content acquisition, social-emotional, and acculturation supports are in place. The authors present and discuss data drawn from interviews with recently reconnected Filipino families as well as written responses from the teachers of the young people in these families. Through their work, the authors conclude that it is particularly important for the young people in families that are reconnecting to have language and content acquisition, social-emotional, and acculturation support for the development of their sense of belonging and identity.

In closing, we at J-BILD hope that these articles will inspire you to reflect upon your own experiences and positions as researchers, learners, educators, fellow beings, and encourage you to continue to thoughtfully and meaningfully engage with yourselves and others.

References

Ahmed, S. (2007). “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing”: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(4), 590–609. doi:10.1080/01419870701356015

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. New York: Pearson.

Said, E. (2000). Reflections on Exile and other essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Unofficial Multilingualism in an Intercultural Province: Polyvocal Responses to Policy as Lived Experience

Volume 1(1): 2017

CASEY BURKHOLDER, University of New Brunswick

ALISON CRUMP, McGill University

LAUREN GODFREY-SMITH, Royal Roads University

MELA SARKAR, McGill University

 

ABSTRACT

Daily language use in Montréal (Québec) is a delicate balancing act that goes beyond bilingual / multilingual categories or multicultural / intercultural frameworks. Language policy, which to an extent dominates the Québec linguistic landscape, can also be seen as the object of constant manipulation and negotiation by individuals and communities who exercise agency in locally-determined and locally significant ways. Our Montréal-based research community, BILD (Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity), draws on perspectives from outside as well as inside Montréal, and Québec, to show how people and policies interact in real-life contexts that defy description in terms of neat dichotomies. We take advantage of our many voices to harmonize a polyvocal conversation about language use on the ground in Montréal and further. Weaving together several strands of research and lived experience, we form a tapestry of complex language practices in constant combination and recombination. We further offer suggestions for ways to rethink official models of multiculturalism and bilingualism as frameworks for understanding how individuals in cities like Montréal use language in their everyday lives.

RÉSUMÉ

À Montréal, Québec, l’utilisation courante de la langue devient un délicat exercice d’équilibre qui va bien au-delà des catégories de bilinguisme / plurilinguisme ou des cadres théoriques reliés au multiculturalisme / interculturalisme. Les politiques linguistiques qui jusqu’à un certain point dominent le paysage linguistique québécois, peuvent être vues en tant qu’objets de manipulation et de négociation constante, par des individus et des communautés qui mettent en pratique des actions sur le plan local. Ces actions sont déterminées et significatives seulement à ce niveau. Notre communauté de recherche basée à Montréal, LIDA (langue, identité, diversité et appartenance) se fonde sur des perspectives situées à l’extérieur ainsi qu’à l’intérieur de Montréal et du Québec; nous cherchons à montrer comment les gens et les politiques interagissent dans divers contextes de la vie quotidienne, contextes qui défient toute description en termes de dichotomies nettes. En utilisant nos multiples voix, nous harmonisons une conversation polyvocale autour des usages linguistiques sur le terrain à Montréal et au-delà. Nous tissons une riche tapisserie de pratiques langagières complexes, en combinaison et recombinaison constante, à partir de plusieurs fils tirés de la recherche et de notre expérience vécue. Nous offrons aussi des suggestions qui permettraient de repenser les modèles officiels de multiculturalisme et de bilinguisme en tant que cadres conceptuels pour comprendre comment les gens habitant des villes comme Montréal utilisent le langage dans leurs vies quotidiennes.

Keywords: multilingualism, interculturalism, language policy, polyvocality.
Continue reading “Unofficial Multilingualism in an Intercultural Province: Polyvocal Responses to Policy as Lived Experience”

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