Abstract
In a global world of unprecedented migrations and superdiversity, awareness and encouragement of bilingual and multilingual practices are also on the rise. In many contexts, children’s language repertoires can be varied and complex and the notion of a Dominant Language Constellation, a core set of languages highly relevant in an individual’s daily life, can apply from an early age. This chapter focuses on language background profiling at elementary schools in Canada. Such profiling is typically done at initial school entry to inform schools as well as larger regional and provincial educational authorities about the potential diversity, use of and proficiency in different languages by the incoming cohorts (and their families). School registration forms thus typically include questions about children’s first, home, primary, additional, etc. languages. The formulations, number, and combinations of questions may vary to a large degree from one school district to another, and also from province to province. Analysis of such questions can be revealing in terms of educational and societal assumptions and orientations to bi/multilingualism, and in terms of general views of language. I offer a discussion of the notion of a native speaker and certain monolingual norms that ensue from it and can be seen in language background profiling practices at schools. Then, building on previous work and incorporating new data, I provide a general summary of the questions used in a large sample of registration forms from various schools and boards in five Canadian provinces. I situate these within the context of recent multilingual frameworks such as plurilingualism, multicompetence and translanguaging, and then focus specifically on the notion of a Dominant Language Constellation, arguing that its premises may entail benefits for the conceptualization of language background profiling.
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Notes
- 1.
Bilingualism in census questionnaires is operationalized as the ability to conduct a conversation in both English and French.
- 2.
Note that the term non-official language can be problematic as it may imply lesser value associated with languages spoken by Indigenous people and immigrants in Canada. I use the terms official and non-official as reported by Statistics Canada while also emphasizing the view that all languages are valuable regardless of legal status.
- 3.
This research does not focus on private schools, which also exist in various forms across the country.
- 4.
Data from francophone school boards in Quebec and in other Canadian provinces is currently being analyzed and will be reported in future publications.
- 5.
Sometimes single schools may also have their individual registration forms, which contributes to even greater variation in profiling questions in a province.
- 6.
Note that even though categories 7 and 11 both refer to ESL, the former focuses on previous instruction received while the latter refers to legal eligibility for ESL support. As such they were kept separate. Also note that questions from categories 10 and 11, whose purpose is to determine legal eligibility for francophone education or ESL support, often asked about the student’s first language or primary (home) language, etc. Even though such questions are of primary interest in this article, they were not collected for the purpose of language profiling but for eligibility determinations, and as such are not included in the analysis, as mentioned above. This is only a technical point since the forms also repeated those questions in a separate section not related to legal eligibility criteria, and in that case such questions were incorporated into categories 1–5, as appropriate.
- 7.
Recall that the data from Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province, is based only on one registration form that covers the schools for the English school board. As such, it is useful to keep in mind that the percentages generated in Fig. 7.1 are based on a single question in category three and category five. Nonetheless, the data are important as they represent an entire educational provincial authority, albeit in a small province.
- 8.
It is worth noting that since this data were first collected, some forms in Ontario have changed and currently allow up to three first languages to be listed. This suggests a welcome change in progress from monolingual to multilingual norms and warrants further investigation and potential reanalysis in future work.
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Acknowledgements
This research has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development Grant # 430-2017-00558) and from the University of Ottawa. Many thanks are due to the following students for assistance with data collection: Stephanie Krulicki, Xiaoyang Zhang, Stephanie Marshall, and Linlan Zhang.
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Slavkov, N. (2020). Language Background Profiling at Canadian Elementary Schools and Dominant Language Constellations. In: Lo Bianco, J., Aronin, L. (eds) Dominant Language Constellations. Educational Linguistics, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52336-7_7
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