‘How does it look and feel to be plurilingual?’: analysing children's representations of plurilingualism through collage

ABSTRACT

Linguistic diversity has become a defining feature of schools in the twenty-first century. How do children make sense of such diversity and their own linguistic identities? This article draws on data generated through a multi-site inquiry with five English and French schools in Canada and France to investigate children's plurilingualism. According to educational policy and curriculum in each context, all of the children involved in this study were receiving instruction at school in English and French. In addition, many children spoke other languages outside of school, at home and in their communities. At the conclusion of each 4–6 month research collaboration in each school, children engaged in making collages that responded to the question, ‘How does it look and feel to be plurilingual’? Drawing on social theories of language representation and plurilingualism, the focus herein is on analyzing how children's representations of plurilingualism made visible through the medium of collage. This article argues for the usefulness of creative multimodal arts-based methods in applied linguistics research and in particular for engaging plurilingual children as co- investigators.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• plurilingualism
• language representation
• children as co-investigators
• arts-based methods
• identity

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, McGill University, for her feedback on this work and helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gail Prasad is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines the cultural and linguistic identities of children and youth, social representations of language and teaching and learning in multilingual school settings. Her work has been published in English and French in journals including TESOL Quarterly, Glottopol, and the Canadian Modern Language Review.

Notes

1 In Quebec, where French is the sole official language, children, according to Bill 101, must be enrolled in francophone schools unless they are ‘rights-holders’ according to the Canadian Charter of Rights. To qualify as a ‘rights-holder’ to English-language schools, children must have at least one parent who has attended school in Canada in English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship; Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement]; W. Garfield Weston Foundation [Weston Doctoral Fellowship].