Our research is mostly conducted in the province of Quebec (Canada).

In the French-speaking province of Quebec, Second/Foreign Language (Lx) Teaching programs are aligned with the Quebec Education Program. Students enrolled in these university programs are taught to use a communicative approach in class, which is associated with the exclusive use of the target language. Teachers are expected to maintain this monolingual approach at all times.

But already by the mid-2000’s, scientific data demonstrated the shortcomings of this pedagogical approach in regard to current findings in cognitive psychology and applied linguistics (see Cummins, 2007). In particular, it has been known for decades that native language use can be beneficial in additional language learning, and that language awareness through the use of learners’ plurilingual repertoires is essential to the acquisition of new language structures.

This is why our research approach views interaction between languages as a resource, rather than something that needs to be avoided.