What is your ‘first’ language in bilingual Canada? A study of language background profiling at publicly funded elementary schools across three provinces

Abstract

Canada is a country with a complex linguistic and cultural landscape characterized by two official languages (English and French), a steady influx of immigrants, and a number of aboriginal communities. Within this rich local context, and in a broader global environment where bilingualism and multilingualism are increasingly recognized as a norm rather than an exception, I review language background profiling practices at publicly funded Canadian elementary schools. A sample of 96 school intake/registration forms was collected from school boards in Canada's three largest English-speaking provinces: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. An analysis of the data indicates a high degree of variability in terms of the number, type and combination patterns of the language background questions asked. While school boards recognize various aspects of sequential bilingualism and multilingualism, most registration forms do not allow explicitly for the possibility of a child having more than one first/native language (simultaneous bilingualism).A discussion of what I call chronological-nativist (i.e. focused on the notion of a person's first/native/mother language) and synchronicfunctional (i.e. focused on a person's current language abilities) approaches to language profiling provides further insights into some underlying assumptions held by provincial educational systems with regard to monolingual, bilingual and multilingual norms. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…The early sequential bilingualism category is open to ambivalence because in many contexts around the world—including HL contexts related to migration—bilingual children, parents, and adults can find it difficult to report a precise sequence in which their languages were learned and they may or may not be able to think of their languages as one L1 and one L2 (e.g., Slavkov, ). Moreover, the very ontological status of the resulting grammars is unavoidably entangled with the unresolved debate over a putative critical period, an age after which language learning becomes qualitatively fundamentally different (Bley‐Vroman, ).…”

Linguistic Risk-Taking: A New Pedagogical Approach and a Research Program

“…3 The term first language can be problematic in cases where an individual's first language is neither English nor French, in cases of simultaneous bilinguals, in cases of language shift within an individual, etc. (for an overview see Slavkov, 2018Slavkov, , 2016. In this article I use it as a shortcut to refer to the first official language of an individual, which amounts to the dominant or stronger official language.…”

Change in home language environment and English literacy achievement over time: A multi-group latent growth curve modeling investigation

“…Although the phenomenon of language shift among multilingual children and their families itself has been extensively researched, the dynamic nature of the home language environment has not drawn much attention among educators and policymakers as a factor to consider in relation to academic achievement. In the context of schools, Slavkov (2018) examined registration forms in three Canadian provinces and found that only a small portion conceptualized home language environments as dynamic, by asking multiple language-profiling questions (e.g., first language, primary language spoken at home, other languages); the other forms operationalized home language environment as static (e.g., home language). Furthermore, in the current literature, research that examines the association between changes in the home language environment and educational outcomes over time is scarce.…”