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.