Bilingualism Archive

Fall 2021 Fellow: Karina Palau What happens when we re-envision a bilingual Spanish-English, Reading & Composition (R&C) course as an opportunity to recognize students’ unbordered language identities and value their dynamic languaging practices? Informed by emerging research on translanguaging, this forthcoming article reports on pedagogical strategies tried in a Fall 2022 pilot course at UC…

How can the language classroom account for the ecologies of language that generate bilingual and multilingual practices, attitudes, and cultural products? Using texts and media that incorporate French and Arabic, this project develops lesson plans to engage students in the critical appraisal of the values, agencies, and registers that shape language use in francophone cultures. …

Bilingualism, Emotions and Cognition by Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University Friday, February 21, 2003 3:00 - 5:00 pm, 370 Dwinelle Hall

Portrait of the Bilingual Child by Fred Genesee, Professor in Psychology, McGill University Researchers/theoreticians, professionals, and laypersons alike often view the simultaneous acquisition of two languages during the pre-school years with reservation and outright apprehension because it is thought to exceed the language learning capacity of the young child and, thus, to incur potential costs,…

Putting Language Proficiency in Its Place: The Status of Academic Language Proficiency in the Education of Bilingual Students by Jim Cummins, Professor, Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, University of Toronto.

Growing up Bilingual: Confusion or Competence by Fred Genesee, Professor of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal.

Learning and Using Other Languages: SLA or Language Crossing by Benjamin Rampton, Professor of Applied Linguistic Research, Thames Valley University, London.

French immersion (FI), one of the hallmarks of French as a Second Language education in Canada and mandated in New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially English/French bilingual province, is often the target of language ideological debates surrounding its purposes and expected outcomes. Yet, notably absent in FI scholarship has been a focus on the ideologies informing students’ investment in French, including what bilingualism might mean for their language learning and identity. In this article, we discuss nine Grade 8 French immersion students’ co-construction of language ideologies regarding bilingualism. In a focus group, these students created a promotional video regarding the merits of bilingualism whose audience was comprised of fictional peers in a predominantly Anglophone province. Our analysis was guided by Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment. We employed the tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis to consider the students’ construction of language ideologies through their video production. Through macro and micro analyses, we identified five primary ideologies: Bilingualism (a) is a matter of personal decision; (b) provides access to jobs; (c) provides access to economic capital; (d) provides access to Francophone communities of practice; and (e) provides access to symbolic capital. We discuss how the students have “remixed” the dominant provincial ideologies on bilingualism into their own, considering the implications of these ideologies on their investment in French. Finally, we suggest how multimodal practices provide a means to develop language students’ meta-cognition and expand their investment in their target language.

Recent studies from the field of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics suggest that bilinguals and multilinguals are in many ways fundamentally different from monolinguals, a difference that starts with a different cerebral structure for language. This difference will constitute the point of departure for my paper: If multilingual people are intrinsically different from monolingual people, it should follow that ...

Throughout her career, Nancy Huston has both accepted and transgressed the limits of bilingualism. Limbes / Limbo (1998), L’empreinte de l’ange (1998), The Mark of the Angel (2000), Danse noire (2013), and Black Dance (2014) are five texts that demonstrate Huston’s diverse use of polyglot writing. While Limbes / Limbo is characterized by ...