Bien qu’au Canada, le multiculturalisme et l’éducation bilingue offrent l’occasion aux secteurs de l’éducation de promouvoir la citoyenneté interculturelle des étudiants, les débats linguistiques idéologiques (DLI) qui ont cours au Nouveau-Brunswick — seule province canadienne officiellement bilingue — risquent d’engendrer la création de structures faisant obstacle au développement interculturel des élèves anglophones en immersion française. En s’appuyant sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle les DLI peuvent être réifiés dans le matériel éducatif, les auteures soumettent à une analyse du discours les objectifs culturels du document de base des Provinces atlantiques en matière d’immersion française, faisant appel au modèle d’acquisition des langues socialement située du groupe Douglas Fir. Elles se penchent sur l’incidence des forces idéologiques (au niveau macro) sur la construction discursive de ces objectifs (au niveau méso). Des ambiguïtés idéologiques sont relevées : l’apprentissage culturel est inscrit dans les idéologies nationales de multiculturalisme et de bilinguisme relativement au capital économique sur le marché mondial, et il est distancé de son lien avec l’histoire du Nouveau-Brunswick. On donne préséance à la communication fonctionnelle des étudiants avec les francophones sur leur évolution personnelle. Les auteures suggèrent des façons d’aborder avec les étudiants du français langue seconde la discussion sur les idéologies linguistiques de manière à favoriser le développement interculturel.

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This article examines four French immersion (FI) teachers’ perspectives on the relationship between language and culture and on their roles as intercultural mediators in New Brunswick (NB), Canada's only officially bilingual province. Data were drawn from semi‐structured interviews with the teachers. Couched in the broader framework of Canada's multicultural policy, the cultural outcomes for NB's FI program underscore the importance of learning French in a multicultural and multilingual society. Understanding the relationship between language and culture is part of this; however, the department explicitly states that it does not intend for immersion students to “adopt” Francophone culture. This analysis shows that these teachers employ a variety of language ideologies, all of which culminate in a “language‐as‐code” approach, devoid of culture and removed from its social contexts of use. They do not consider deep cultural discussions to have a place in their classrooms, although each teacher demonstrates some level of intercultural awareness regarding the language/culture dialectic in their private lives. The works by Kohler (), Di Stefano (), and Kearney () are employed to consider possible ways forward for teacher training on intercultural mediation in immersion classrooms and on curriculum development to target students’ intercultural competence.

French second language education, including the option of one‐way French immersion, is mandated for majority‐language Anglophone children in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province. Language ideological debates in the province surrounding official English–French bilingualism led us to investigate adolescent majority‐language immersion students’ investment in French, the co‐official minority language, using Darvin and Norton's tripartite (capital, ideology, identity) model. We discuss 3 student profiles, drawing on data collected from multimodal focus groups conducted among 8th‐grade French immersion students. Our analysis reveals a dominance of neoliberal ideologies in these students’ investment in French, rendering it imbalanced and largely driven by imagined access to future economic capital. Language as cultural or social capital figures inconsistently in their investment. Drawing on our data, we conclude by proposing that Darvin and Norton's model, with a balanced focus on each kind of capital within the model, may be used conceptually by educators in program development. The model used in such a way would enable educators to give equal priority to students’ identity and intercultural development as to their preparation for participation in economic marketplaces, thus potentially expanding majority‐language students’ investment in their co‐official minority second language.

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