Research Themes
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.
All our research projects are based on a particular plurilingual approach to language teaching. Building on research from Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) and recent perspectives from the field of multilingualism, we have developed new pedagogical interventions. Instead of limiting language use in formal settings to the target language only, our novel approach promotes the interaction between learners’ linguistic repertoires in order to maximize the acquisition of an additional language.
In more traditional, monolingual approaches, non-target languages are usually seen as a means to facilitate information transfer (e.g., to explain something). However, our plurilingual pedagogical approach doesn’t view non-target languages as information vehicles, but as learning resources. Learners are encouraged to draw explicit parallels between languages as a means of increasing language awareness. The use of non-target languages as learning resources forms the basis of our plurilingual approach.
Our research projects are unique in the field in that they always include two distinct, but interconnected, components: specialization, and pedagogy. These two components nourish and complete each other as our research progresses.
The pedagogical component of our research targets the interaction between all the languages known by learners in order to facilitate additional language (Lx) development. Our work embraces the tenets of crosslinguistic pedagogy challenging traditional approaches imposing target-language-only communicative activities in class. This new framework promoting the use of learners’ entire linguistic repertoires is based on recent research demonstrating the positive effects of crosslinguistic practices on different aspects of language and identity development of plurilingual learners.
In the Canadian context, research using the crosslinguistic framework has mostly focused on bilingual development, and almost exclusively in French-English/English-French immersion programs.Similarly, research having investigated crosslinguistic classroom practicesin the U.S.A. has mostly been conducted in dual language programs targeting emerging bilinguals of English and Spanish.In these programs, learners usually share the same native and target languages. However, both Canadian and American social and linguistic landscapes are increasingly diverse, thus leading learners’ linguistic repertoires to be increasingly complex. Some learners make use of more than two languages in day-to-day communicative situations, and their repertoires include a wider range of languages. Our research takes into account these social changes.
Building on the concept of languaging, where language is seen and used as a learning tool to acquire new knowledge, the notion of translanguaging refers to the process of acquiring new knowledge by mobilizing different languages as a resource. We propose to use translanguaging as strategic classroom practice in order to eliminate knowledge barriers on languages and between languages, and allow learners to use their plurilingual repertoires as a resource to develop new language knowledge.
The specialization component of our research has a double objective: to demystify, and to promote, crosslinguistic pedagogy to additional language (Lx) teachers and pre-service teachers. By building bridges between plurilingual approaches and the more traditional communicative approach, we want to establish a dialogue between researchers in ISLA and plurilingualism, and Lx teachers. Our objective is to help teachers navigate between their beliefs about Lx teaching, visions of ideal Lx class settings, and individual situations, in order to make informed pedagogical choices.
Studies show that popular beliefs about Lx teaching are often influenced by an “ideology of language separation”. This ideology leads teachers to reject the use of nontarget languages in class for fear of “contaminating” target language acquisition (see Li Wei, 2018). It is thus essential to examine these beliefs in a perspective of professional development and continuing education for all actors in Lx teaching.
Our various research projects examine the beliefs of teachers at different moments of their training and professional paths, in order to foster the development of a reflective practice to debunk complex, and often conflicting, perceptions deriving from an ideology of language separation. Teachers interested in these topics are invited to join one of our workshops on plurilingual pedagogy, and more specifically on implementing our pedagogical sequence.