DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFTS

According to Statistics Canada (2012), the 2011 census found that Canada's population grew by 5.9% to a total of 33,476,688 from 2006 to 2011, the highest rate of increase of any other member of the G8 group of industrialized nations during this time. This was attributed to a slightly higher fertility rate and an increase in the number of nonpermanent residents and immigrants in Canada. Comparisons of the 2011 census data related to language and immigration to earlier census data are complicated because of changes to the questionnaires used by Statistics Canada, but a report on the 2006 census reveals that in the previous 5-year period, more than 1.1 million immigrants arrived in the country, and 81% of them had a mother tongue other than French or English (Statistics Canada, 2008a). According to the same source, the number of people who most often spoke a non-official language at home more than doubled between 1971 and 2006, from 1.6 million to 3.7 million. In 2006, this proportion of the population was 11.9%, which was equivalent to one out of eight Canadians.

Drawing on Statistics Canada reports available earlier, Duff (Reference Duff2007) observed that while multilingualism was on the rise among the immigrant population at that time, this was not the case for Canadian-born Anglophones living outside Quebec, most of whom remained monolingual, with the exception of graduates of French immersion programs. She noted that in schools where languages other than French and English are excluded, assimilationist policies lead to subtractive bi/multilingualism for many learners.

Educational policies that are legacies of colonialism in Canada have had a devastating impact on Indigenous languages, so that only three out of the 50 that are still spoken today are not considered endangered (Sarkar & Metallic, Reference Sarkar and Metallic2008) and the number of children learning an Indigenous language is steadily declining (Ball, Reference Ball2009). This is occurring despite the fact that the Indigenous population (identified as Aboriginal in federal documents to include Inuit, Métis, and First Nations people) grew by 45% between 1996 and 2006, compared with 8% for the non-Indigenous population (Statistics Canada, 2008b). In addition, as Sterzuk (Reference Sterzuk2011) pointed out in a study of the school experiences of Indigenous students, many of these learners speak indigenized varieties of French and English that are being suppressed by society and schools, which presents further challenges for Indigenous communities. Yet Patrick (Reference Patrick2007) reminded us that Indigenous youth also participate in the production of new language practices and forms of cultural expression, which deserve recognition because they demonstrate strength and creativity in adapting to changes in the social and economic conditions of their environment. Patrick's research is discussed in the section on Canadian policy below.

Thus, while multilingualism is increasing in some sectors of the Canadian population, not everyone is benefiting from additional language learning. This speaks to a pressing need for further research and education about multilingualism in Canada in order to stimulate informed discussions about its complexity and reveal under what conditions it may benefit individuals and society.

CANADIAN POLICY

During the 1960s, the federal government became more invested in the management of linguistic and cultural diversity through policy in what was seen by some as an effort to reduce tensions between groups by protecting the rights of citizens. However, as indicated below, some analysts suggest that policy has less to do with problem solving and is more about regulating communities, leading them to examine the agendas underlying official policy and question its relevance today. Researchers interested in language and education consider the implications of the federal policy framework for different language groups in Canadian society. Some scholars point to disjunctions between the increasing diversity in Canada and federal policy that still constructs the nation in terms of linguistic duality, arguing that it leads to the marginalization of speakers of other languages and their exclusion from educational programs. Others approach their analysis of policy by providing detailed descriptions of the discourses of local actors and their language practices in particular spheres of activity.

To situate ongoing discussions of policy in research, it is important to recall that when the Official Languages Act of 1969 came into force, French and English were declared official languages, federal institutions were expected to offer services in both official languages, and provisions were made for all children to learn an official language in school. The rights of official language communities were entrenched in the constitution with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, and the Multiculturalism Act of 1988 recognized cultural and racial diversity in Canadian society. One of the objectives of the Multiculturalism Act was to preserve and enhance the use of non-official languages, while strengthening the status and use of French and English in the country.

Some discussions of policy in the literature concentrate on issues of inclusion in educational programs offered in French. For example, Mady & Turnbull (Reference Mady and Turnbull2010) provided a review of policy documents revealing that federal policy fails to acknowledge that speakers of non-official languages might wish to learn both official languages, and this omission is reproduced in educational policies for language instruction developed by provinces and territories across the country that have jurisdiction over education. Consequently, non-official language speakers who attend school in one official language have no guarantees that they can access instruction in the other official language as well. Moreover, as Mady (Reference Mady2007) documented in a mixed-method study conducted in Ontario, students from non-official language backgrounds were excluded from French as a second language classes, known as Core French, based on the assumption that they could not handle learning two official languages at school. Yet a qualitative case study conducted in British Columbia by Carr (Reference Carr2009) showed that they can perform well in Core French classes while enrolled in English language schools, even in programs where the classes are offered in an intensive format. While culturally and linguistically diverse learners are not included in policy provisions for French second language instruction, neither are they accounted for in discussions of Francophones in federal policy (Prasad, Reference Prasad2012). But as Prasad noted, the Ontario government has adopted a more inclusive definition of Francophones recently so that “it now extends to ‘those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English, but who have a particular knowledge of French as an Official Language and use French at home, including many recent immigrants to Ontario’ (Office of Francophone Affairs, 2009, par. 2)” (cited in Prasad, p. 190). As Prasad observed, some teachers in Francophone schools in Ontario also embrace this broader view in their discursive constructions of children as capable of developing a sense of belonging to la francophonie, while affiliating with a plurality of other identities as well.

Other publications examine policy in relation to English language instruction offered to immigrants. For instance, Derwing and Munro (Reference Derwing, Munro, Joshee and Johnson2007) provided a review of the policy that gave rise to English as a second language (ESL) instruction offered to children in English language schools and Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC), an ESL program available to adults outside Quebec. Their review indicated that ESL programs face important challenges, such as a lack of ESL-focused teacher training and administrative oversight in schools, and that LINC programs are plagued by problems such as regional inequities in the amount of language training available, the quality of instruction, and the preparation of teachers. These issues and many others were identified as well by Haque and Cray (Reference Haque and Cray2007) in their analysis of interviews with LINC teachers who described conditions that limit their work and contribute to their marginalization. Haque and Cray attributed these problems in part to the fact that LINC programs are delivered through a contracting system, by various organizations, and are given different degrees of priority or simply cancelled when student enrolments drop. Cervatiuc and Ricento (Reference Cervatiuc and Ricento2012) explored the hidden curriculum of a LINC program on three levels: instruction, approaches to teaching Canadian culture, and instructors’ self-perceived teaching roles. They found that the transaction pedagogical approach most commonly adopted in these programs did not address the real challenges that immigrants face in their first years in Canada. Fleming (Reference Fleming2010) raised questions about the hidden intentions of policies governing LINC programming after an analysis of assessment guidelines revealed that they reserve exploring issues of citizenship in terms of rights and responsibilities only for those with exceptional English abilities.

Federal policy is considered as well in work on heritage language programs (Duff, Reference Duff, Brinton, Kagan and Bauckus2008; Duff & Li, Reference Duff and Li2009), highlighting how the provision of these educational services is often linked to policy measures such as the Multiculturalism Act and the Official Languages Act that protect the rights of official language minorities, but they are supported in varying ways regionally. As Duff (Reference Duff, Brinton, Kagan and Bauckus2008) argued in an analysis of language policy changes in British Columbia, the term heritage languages is being replaced in federal documents and provincial curricula with international languages, an ideological shift that is guided by political interests and economic pressures rather than educational insight.

In a historical overview of policy and education, Burnaby (Reference Burnaby, May and Hornberger2008) suggested that Canada's language emphases in policy be reevaluated given current demographic trends, observing that “one would scarcely believe that Canadians speak languages other than English and French” (p. 334), since federal documents emphasize the rights of Francophone and Anglophone communities and “refer to speakers of non-official languages as other cultural groups” (p. 334). The discourse around official languages is based on an assumption of the universal nature of language and the immutable origins of separate languages, according to Haque (Reference Haque2012), which serves as a justification for creating a hierarchy of group membership according to official designations as English, French, Aboriginal, and Multicultural. In a study of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that led to the enactment of the Official Languages Act and the Multiculturalism Act, Haque provided a critical analysis of Canadian policy as ideology and argued that the term Aboriginal “points to the suppression of distinct Indigenous languages” and the designation Multicultural “allows this group to be defined only through culture while it still emerges as a category in opposition to other linguistic groups” (p. 18).

As others have shown (Ramanathan & Morgan, Reference Ramanathan and Morgan2007; Ricento, Reference Ricento and Ricento2006, Reference Ricento, Hellinger and Pauwels2007; Shohamy, Reference Shohamy2006), applying critical theory to the study of policy helps to uncover the discursive forces and ideologies of power involved in the policy process, revealing how a conceptualization of language as a closed unit with fixed boundaries can be used to construct social categories. This view of language has been challenged by a postmodern perspective that describes language as a multidimensional open system and regards multilingualism as a dynamic mixing of codes, varieties, and modes of expression. Postmodernism also calls into question grand narratives of social control by the state and dominant groups advanced in critical theory, according to Ricento (Reference Ricento and Ricento2006, Reference Ricento, Hellinger and Pauwels2007). He explained that policy can be understood from a postmodern perspective in terms of power relations operating at the micro level of language practices, as Pennycook (Reference Pennycook and Ricento2006) suggested, or as niched ideological processes in which actors at all levels of society participate within limited domains of activity, as Bloomaert (Reference Bloomaert and Ricento2006) proposed.

Postmodern and poststructural perspectives on language and policy have framed ethnographic research conducted in some minority communities. For example, da Silva and Heller (Reference Da Silva and Heller2009) found that in the context of globalization and the new economy, the Canadian government shifted its role from protector of minority rights to provider and producer of economic opportunities. Their analysis shows how this occurred through a process of mutual accommodation during negotiations between the federal government and representatives of Francophone communities outside Quebec. However, they cautioned that in areas where Francophone immigrants of diverse backgrounds have settled, the commodification of linguistic and cultural resources raises questions about who gets included and excluded in the production process, who consumes these goods and what are the consequences for defining la francophonie.

Ethnographic research uncovers not only how policy is constructed discursively on the ground, it also reveals how local groups engage with multilingualism as a creative response to changes in their environment. Han (Reference Han2011) described how multilingual ideologies, policies, and practices were constructed by members of a Chinese church in Vancouver as they developed inclusive practices that could be instructive to mainstream institutions, such as offering activities in multiple languages, treating newcomers as potential full members of the community by assigning them speaking roles regardless of their level of language proficiency, having old-timers learn the languages of newcomers, and helping the latter learn the languages they need and desire. In a study on the use of Indigenous languages, French, and English in Ontario and Nunavik, Patrick (Reference Patrick2007) explained how discourses of language loss and disappearance that frame some work on Indigenous languages, including revitalization efforts, are tied to standardized views of language and idealized notions of tradition, which risks marginalizing those who speak nonstandardized language varieties and adopt new forms of expression. Patrick proposed that notions of linguistic and cultural continuity and the metaphor of a linguistic market offer more productive alternatives for describing the variety of language practices observed in multilingual Indigenous communities. She suggested that they allow for a more nuanced understanding of language practices as a means of affirming identity in response to emerging economies and shifting forms of cultural production.

Thus, policy is approached in the literature either as a text or as a discursive practice so that some publications identify disjunctions between policy documents in Canada and the reality of a linguistically and culturally diverse population, while others document how policy is constructed locally through a modification of practices in light of a changing environment and growing multilingualism.

RESEARCH ON MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS

The literature indicates that more researchers have turned their attention to multilingual learners of different ages in recent years to investigate their language development and learning experiences in various settings. As Lyster and Lapkin (Reference Lyster and Lapkin2007) explained in an editorial to a special issue on multilingualism in Canadian schools published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, several studies examine how educational institutions deal with multilingualism and learners of diverse language origins. Multilingual language practices at home and in the community are the focus of some publications, as are representations of multilingualism and multilingual learners constructed by parents and teachers. Most publications on multilingualism in Canada report on field-based qualitative studies that use ethnographic approaches, with the exception of two articles. In one article, Llama, Cardoso, and Collins (Reference Llama, Cardoso and Collins2010) reported on a study situated in research on third language (L3) acquisition that investigated the impact first and second languages have on acquiring L3 phonology among adult learners of Spanish who also spoke French and English. Their findings point to L2 status as a stronger predictor of L3 acquisition than typology. In another article, El Euch (Reference El Euch2010) proposed a typology of multilingualism building on current research and the notion of bilingualité, a psycholinguistic concept advanced by Hamers and Blanc (Reference Hamers and Blanc2000) to describe individual bilingualism. In most of the recent work on multilingualism in Canada, language is viewed as a social practice linked to the construction of identities and related to broader social processes, a theoretical stance that is currently adopted internationally by many researchers interested in multilingualism (Gardner & Martin-Jones, Reference Gardner and Martin-Jones2012). Much of the research on multilingual learners examines their literacy practices in a diversity of languages expressed through multiple semiotic forms, as is evident in several of the articles discussed here that appeared in a special issue of the Canadian Modern Language Review on multilingual literacies (Lotherington & Dagenais, Reference Lotherington and Dagenais2008).

Multilingual children's practices and social interactions are documented in case studies illustrating how identities are discursively constructed in different settings. Focusing on multilingual children enrolled in French immersion programs in Vancouver, Dagenais, Day, and Toohey (Reference Dagenais, Day and Toohey2006) described how a multilingual student's identity as a literate child was mediated by teacher expectations of her academic success. Dagenais and Moore (Reference Dagenais and Moore2008) documented how young multilingual immersion students of Chinese ancestry relied on technologies available to them at home and mobilized a range of multimodal literacy practices in different languages to communicate with others locally and internationally according to their needs. This research also confirms previous findings that parents encouraged their children to become multilingual in English, French, and family languages in the hope that it would help them identify with family and community members nearby and elsewhere, while gaining access to imagined French-English bilingual communities in Canada. Likewise, Riches and Curdt-Christiansen (Reference Riches and Curdt-Christiansen2010) demonstrated in their case study of Chinese and Anglophone parents in Montreal that both groups had high expectations of their children, considered it important that they develop a sense of identity related to their family language, and supported bi/multilingual literacy development by engaging them in a range of literacy practices at home in all the languages of their repertoire. Allen (Reference Allen2007) interviewed multilingual adolescents in Montreal enrolled in classes d'accueil (welcoming classes). This study revealed that they engaged in individual name-claiming acts of agency by making their own choices among academic and linguistic options that were available to them, despite institutional practices that Allen referred to as name-calling because they discursively categorize immigrant adolescents as French-deficient.

Research with multilingual adults also exposes how they navigate social interactions and representations of languages in their own milieu. Multilingual students enrolled in an undergraduate academic literacy course in Vancouver were found to be skilled at negotiating the liminal language and literacy spaces of their lives as they adopted practices that varied according to context (Marshall, Hayashi, & Yeung, Reference Lee and Marshall2012). Interviews with them and an analysis of their writing showed that whereas they were constrained at university by discourses of remediation and deficit that required them to perform in written academic English at an institutionally acceptable standard, in other contexts they were able to mix languages, styles, and genres creatively. Lee and Marshall (Reference Lee and Marshall2012) reported that even though university students used a diversity of languages in complex ways, some accepted a representation of their practices as inadequate and reproduced power structures by centering attention on English as the superior language form. Ethnographic research Byrd Clark (Reference Byrd Clark2010) conducted with Italian-Canadian university students enrolled in a French teacher education program documented how their investment in the program and the French language was not only ideological and linked to their awareness of discourses on Canadian nationalism and linguistic markets, but was also related to personal attachments and desires to be seen as unique multilinguals and French-English bilinguals, which they pursued while claiming membership in the Italian community as well. An awareness of language politics was similarly documented in Lamarre and Lamarre's (Reference Lamarre, Lamarre and Bulot2009) analysis of a young adult's complex multilingual practices and language choices as he moved around the city of Montreal. They described how this young man's social interactions were oriented by his evaluation of the linguistic stakes at play in each location he visited. Similarly, in Taylor's (Reference Taylor2008) study, teachers in Montreal negotiated competing discourses on cultural and linguistic pluralism in federal and provincial policies as their own discourses on identity, multilingual literacies, and academic literacy shifted during their participation in professional development workshops. They referenced their own identities and family language histories as they began to include students’ linguistic capital in their emerging definitions of literacy practices and consider multilingualism as a valuable site of identity work.

The literature on multilingual learners in Canada based on case studies and ethnographic methods thus indicates that their language practices are ideological and shifting, and are tied to context. It also demonstrates how their identities as multilinguals are constructed discursively in response to the policies and representations of language that circulate around them.

INNOVATIONS IN MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION

Despite the results of research supportive of bilingualism and multilingualism, many Canadian schools continue to privilege the language(s) of instruction to the exclusion of other languages as a number of researchers have observed (Armand, Sirois, & Abadou, Reference Armand, Sirois and Abadou2008; Cummins, Reference Cummins2007; Cummins & Early, Reference Cummins and Early2011; Dagenais, Armand, Walsh, & Maraillet, Reference Dagenais, Armand, Walsh and Maraillet2007; Denos, Toohey, Neilson, & Waterstone, Reference Denos, Toohey, Neilson and Waterstone2009; Lotherington, Reference Lotherington2007, Reference Lotherington2011; Toohey & Dagenais, 2013). In response to this problem, several teacher-researcher teams have started exploring alternative pedagogies that encourage the cohabitation of languages and mixing of expressive modes at school as a way of supporting multilingual learners and recognizing language diversity in society.

A range of innovations in multilingual education has emerged in different regions of the country. Most projects are located in mainstream English and French schools, classes d'accueil, and French immersion programs that enroll students from diverse language backgrounds, but some serve other populations as well, and many involve parents and other community members in the co-creation of novel approaches. While they all aim at broadening the focus of language instruction by providing opportunities to incorporate other languages used in multilingual contexts, each project focuses on one or more approaches to multilingual education. These include developing language awareness activities, documenting the linguistic landscape and community language practices, producing videos with second language learners, and creating bilingual texts in school languages and other languages representative of learners’ linguistic repertoires.

For example, Dagenais et al. (Reference Dagenais, Armand, Walsh and Maraillet2007) considered whether language awareness activities developed in Europe might be adapted for French language classrooms in Canada. Their analysis of research conducted in elementary classes in Montreal and Vancouver revealed that these activities led students to draw on collective linguistic and cultural knowledge to approach unknown languages and co-construct new understandings of language diversity. In an analysis of language awareness activities developed for preschools in inner-city Montreal, Armand et al. (Reference Armand, Sirois and Abadou2008) showed how very young children constructed positive representations of their first language and language diversity. Expanding on this work, Dagenais, Moore, Sabatier, Lamarre, and Armand (Reference Dagenais, Moore, Sabatier, Lamarre, Armand, Shohamy and Gorter2009) anchored language awareness activities in children's lived experiences of their neighborhoods by having them take photographs of multilingual signage, gather other artifacts of multilingualism such as food labels and community newspapers in different languages, and produce videos about their findings. As they did so, children began to question stereotypic representations of language diversity and critically interrogate the status of different languages in the linguistic landscape.

Working with English language learners, Toohey has led projects in Vancouver in which elementary school children's knowledge of cultural practices were used as the basis for developing various print and visual literacy activities (Denos et al., Reference Denos, Toohey, Neilson and Waterstone2009). In one activity, students of Punjabi-Sikh origin helped conduct a community scan of their cultural resources and out-of-school practices, revealing that they participated a rich array of multiliterate, multilingual, and multimodal rituals at home and in their communities, which were ignored in the mainstream curriculum (Smythe & Toohey, Reference Smythe and Toohey2009). In another activity, students engaged in intergenerational bilingual storytelling sessions that were recorded on MP3 players and used as a basis for child-produced drawings and bilingual narratives. One of the benefits of this activity, according to Marshall and Toohey (Reference Marshall and Toohey2010) was that it enabled children to address difficult or controversial topics such as political violence or religious conflict that would normally not be broached in school.

Likewise, in her work with staff and children from an elementary school serving a multilingual population in Toronto, Lotherington (Reference Lotherington2007, Reference Lotherington2011) and her teacher-researcher team developed several novel teaching approaches, including multilingual storytelling activities that creatively explored the potential of various digital technologies in bridging the gap between home and school literacies. In addition to documenting how a multilingual community can engage in more meaningful literacy tasks at school that showcase children's knowledge and language competencies, this research revealed that some conditions of work in schools, such as timetabling restrictions, present ongoing challenges to innovation because they limit opportunities for regular classroom and specialist teachers to collaborate on joint multilingual initiatives.

Similarly, Cummins and Early (Reference Cummins and Early2011) led several teams of researchers and teachers in Vancouver and Toronto elementary and secondary schools involved in the large-scale Multiliteracies Project. Their book documented the production of bilingual texts in diverse languages, which they referred to as identity texts to signal how students invest their identities in the creative process while drawing on written, spoken, signed, visual, musical, dramatic, or combinations of multimodal forms of expression. The vast collection of case studies in this publication illustrates how this form of multilingual education has been taken up in many ways in Canadian classrooms and other international contexts as well. In addition, a special topic issue of Writing & Pedagogy (Taylor & Cummins, Reference Taylor and Cummins2011) recently featured research on the development of identity texts in response to the needs of a range of historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous parents who wanted to create bilingual texts in Ojibway and English for their children (Taylor, Reference Taylor2011). Other compelling accounts of teachers and researchers working with identity texts in Canadian schools appear elsewhere (Cohen, Reference Cohen2011; Giampapa, Reference Giampapa2010; Stille, Reference Stille2011) as well, which speaks to the enthusiasm this approach has generated in professional and scholarly communities.

Some researchers have become interested in the potential of video making as a powerful form of multimodal and multilingual expression for language learners. Reporting on a study situated in Toronto within the Multiliteracies Project, Stille (Reference Stille2011) examined whether documentary filmmaking using digital videos might serve as a useful participatory approach to arts-based research aimed at stimulating discourses of understanding and engaging with social activism. Stille described how children used video to conduct research on the local community, which led them to identify a need for access to nature and decide to make an edible garden on school grounds with the help of parents from diverse origins who had a range of competencies in the school language. She explains how the production of a documentary about the creation of the garden was beneficial in terms of involving parents in educational activities and teaching children about the power of voice in multimodal literacies, yet she also cautions that it raises questions about what gets included and excluded in filmic narratives, highlighting the need to consider peoples’ histories and issues of power in the production of video and academically framed representations.

In a similar vein, teacher-researcher groups working in Vancouver are investigating whether video production at school might help children represent their out-of-school practices in ways not afforded by print literacy. In one project (Toohey, Dagenais & Schulze, Reference Toohey, Dagenais and Schulze2012), student-teachers led video-making activities with elementary- and secondary-age English language learners during teaching internships situated either locally or internationally in India or Mexico. The production and exchange of videos between sites was found to enable students in all locations to display competencies in different languages as they narrated their films, while showcasing their talents such as dancing, singing, and playing sports, or representing cultural practices such as religious rites that are not easily conveyed in second language print tasks. The analysis of videos showed that the children represented themselves as situated in a particular place in a very powerful and knowledgeable way, yet also globally connected and informed about sports, music, or film icons that circulate internationally.

While the literature describes multilingual pedagogies that have emerged mainly in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, Canada's largest urban centers where multilingualism is most visible, it points also to their expansion beyond these areas, and it reveals that educators see identity work and multimodal literacies as central to teaching. It also suggests that educators are intent on pushing back on monolingual policies that marginalize students who speak non-official languages and resisting the pressure to conform to a monolingual teaching norm, even where this predominates and educators struggle with competing discourses about language (Taylor, Reference Taylor2008). Some of these change initiatives are situated in contexts where multilingualism is viewed with great apprehension. For example, in the largest school district in Montreal where Armand et al. (Reference Armand, Sirois and Abadou2008) were developing language awareness pedagogies, a policy was passed accepting only French on school grounds. The district recently announced that an enforced version of the policy would be implemented as of September 2012 (Commission scolaire de Montréal, 2009), a measure that appears extreme but resonates with restrictive policies that have been observed elsewhere in Canada.

However, as Ramanathan and Morgan (Reference Ramanathan and Morgan2007) suggested, rather than focusing on restrictive policies and seeing educators as small players constrained by policy, it is more productive to consider how they serve as key agents who engage with others to find creative solutions to problems posed by policy “that open up moments and spaces for transformative pedagogical interventions” (p. 448). The innovations in multilingual education reviewed here suggest that a grassroots transformation in language teaching is taking place in several locations where Canadian educators are negotiating space for the inclusion of more languages in classrooms, despite policy measures that do not support such inclusion.