Family language policy and school language choice: pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism in a Canadian context

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a survey with 170 school-age children growing up with two or more languages in the Canadian province of Ontario where English is the majority language, French is a minority language, and numerous other minority languages may be spoken by immigrant or Indigenous residents. Within this context the study focuses on minority language transmission and maintenance, drawing on insights from family language policy and choice of language of schooling. I describe the general language-related characteristics of the households surveyed and discuss the strategies and resources that parents may use in order to place their children along several different bilingual or multilingual pathways. The results highlight the importance of the choice of language of communication between parents as a potential modelling and extra input opportunity in the household, in addition to the choice of language used by each parent to address a child directly. Furthermore, choice of language of schooling is associated with the likelihood of a child developing as a multilingual individual. Increasing access, inclusion and general enrolment in minority language education are seen as a way of increasing not only the level of bilingualism but also multilingualism in the province.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• multilingualism and plurilingualism
• family language policy (FLP)
• language socialisation
• one parent one language (OPOL/1P1L)
• school choice
• Canada

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Stephanie Marshall, Emily Nishibori, Wenqian Li, Odilia Yim and Lesya Alexandra Granger for their invaluable assistance with data collection, analysis, and/or feedback on earlier drafts. Two anonymous reviewers for the International Journal of Multilingualism provided thorough and insightful feedback which I appreciate highly. My presentations at the 2015 Carleton University Invited Speaker Series, the 2015 Symposium on Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Canada, and the 10th International Conference on Multilingualism and Third Language Acquisition (IAML3 2016) drew on results from this project. I am grateful to the audiences and reviewers of these events for helpful comments and suggestions. Many thanks to the institutional representatives at school boards, community organisations, language schools as well as colleagues and friends who helped popularise the survey and recruit participants. My most sincere gratitude goes to the parents/guardians of school-aged bi/multilingual children who were interested in participating in the study. This project was funded through a University of Ottawa Research Development Program (RDP) Grant and a matching Seed Grant from the Faculty of Arts awarded in 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Note that De Houwer cautions against the use of the terms active versus passive bilingual and prefers describing children in terms of number of languages understood vs. spoken. I use these terms throughout the article because of their convenience and higher recognition.

2. While the term non-official language is sometimes used in government discourse, in the rest of this paper I use the term heritage language to refer to both immigrant languages and Indigenous languages in Canada. Indigenous languages, even though a distinct category on a number of historical, cultural, political and linguistic dimensions, are included in the heritage category as they relate to Canada’s cultural and linguistic heritage, despite the differences with immigrant languages and cultures. Also note that the data sample collected for the present study included a very limited number of Indigenous language speaking participants and thus a separate analysis for this group was not possible. For work on FLP and schooling relating specifically to Indigenous populations, I refer interested readers to Patrick, Budach, and Muckpaloo (2013) and Rowan (2014), among others.

3. For historical reasons, Catholic school boards are publicly funded in Ontario but not necessarily in other provinces.

4. A nominal materials fee may be collected by some school boards.

5. It is important to note that in Ontario French is taught as a required subject in schools, even if an English programme is chosen for the main language of instruction. Such French second language programmes, known as Core French, are not content-based, have lower number of hours (compared to French immersion), and typically result in lower proficiency. Thus, Core French students are not considered to have met the functional bi/multilingualism criterion adopted in this study and are included in pathway 1. While this decision may be somewhat conservative and even unfair to Core French learners with strong motivation and possibly higher language aptitude, research suggests that graduates of such programmes across Canada are generally not able to communicate in French (see Lapkin, Mady, & Arnott, 2009, for an overview of issues and studies).

6. This article is based on the results of a larger ongoing project and only a subset of the data and research questions are discussed here.

7. This estimate is based on data from school year 2013–2014 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016) and includes enrolment in French immersion programs and Francophone school boards, but excludes Core French or other French as a second language instruction that is not content-based (see also note 5).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Ottawa: Research Development Programme & Faculty of Arts [grant number 130324].