‘But do monolingual people really exist?’ Analysing elementary students’ contrasting representations of plurilingualism through sequential reflexive drawing

ABSTRACT

This article draws on data generated through a multi-site collaborative inquiry with students across five English and French schools in Canada and France to investigate children’s social representations of plurilingualism. Children were asked to draw a sequence of reflexive drawings of a monolingual, a bilingual and a plurilingual individual, as well as themselves. Drawing on theories of social representations of language and plurilingualism, the focus herein is on analysing children’s language representations made visible through the medium of drawing. The article concludes with a discussion of the affordances of using creative multimodal methods in applied linguistics research.

Cet article s’appuie sur les données collectées lors d’une recherche collaborative multi-sites menée avec des élèves de cinq écoles anglaises et françaises au Canada et en France afin d’examiner leurs représentations sociales du plurilinguisme. Les enfants ont réalisé plusieurs dessins réflexifs : un individu monolingue, un individu bilingue, un individu plurilingue et eux-mêmes. En se basant sur les théories des représentations sociales des langues et du plurilinguisme, l’article analyse les représentations des langues des enfants rendues visibles au moyen du dessin. L’article propose également une réflexion sur les possibilités d’utiliser des méthodes multimodales créatives dans la recherche en linguistique appliquée.

KEYWORDS:

• Social representations
• plurilingualism
• reflexive drawing
• childhood methodologies

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.

ORCID

Gail Lori Prasad http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5540-1405

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Doctoral Joseph Armand Bombardier Graduate Research Scholarship (2010–2014) and a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement (2013-2014), as well as a Weston Doctoral Fellowship (2013–2014) and an OISE/UT Doctoral Completion Award (2014–2015).