Teachers unite! A call to reclaim ‘bilingual/multilingual’ (by Lauren Godfrey-Smith)

I was recently teaching an ESL class of intermediate-level adults when the topic of being bilingual/multilingual came up; we’d been listening to a news story about how being bilingual boosts brainpower and decreases the chance of memory problems later in life. When I asked my students if they felt bilingual, I was sorry to see only a few of the two dozen students raise their hands. And yet, when I asked them to tell me whether they used English every day for communicative tasks like doctor’s appointments and grocery shopping and parent-teacher interviews, they all said yes.

Are you in or out? Indigenous and minority languages shaping the linguistic landscape (by April Passi)

After the chaos of a summer filled with travelling, working, family visits and July 1^st “déménagement”, I was grateful to barbecue with good friends in my new backyard. We
reconnected over food, stories and laughter, updating each other on our summer adventures. The stories were told in a variety of languages too, showing off the multilingual competencies of my friends. English seemed to be the common language, but at a few different moments throughout the evening, some groups formed to share and laugh in Arabic or Spanish, neither of which I speak or understand. I observed these small groups admiringly…but with the distinct feeling that I was an observer, an outsider.

Multilingual BBQ space 🙂

“De Pays de Galles à Montréal”

The BILD Research Community is very pleased to welcome this week’s guest blogger, Sara Orwig. She is currently a PhD student at the School of Welsh in Cardiff, thanks to a scholarship from y Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. Her PhD work bridges the study of literature and linguistics, and she is examining code switching in Welsh, French-Canadian and English literature. She recently visited Montreal as part of her research, thanks to a scholarship from the International Council for Canadian studies. Find out more about Sara on her LinkedIn profile or follow her on Twitter (@20fachgoch).

Parc Jarry: Parler comme un ballophone (by Stephen Davis)

 

Dribble, dribble, dribble.

Hey, tu veux jouer?

On cherche un troisième

Qui peut bien shooter.

 

C’est nous contre eux,

Les trois gars là-bas.

On joue jusqu’à onze.

Check the ball déjà.

 

Hey, je suis libre,

Passe-le moi down low!

Vas-y vite, écoute-moi,

Run the give-and-go.

 

Reste sur tes pieds,

Don’t fall for the pump.

Tu peux pas me bloquer –

White men can’t jump.

 

Man, c’est une faute,

Tu me frappes chaque fois!

Touche-moi encore

Et je dunk sur toi.

 

 

Hey, t’as un accent,

Tu viens pas d’ici?

Ok, bienvenue,

Now get back on D.

 

Donne-moi un pick,

Check mon fadeaway.

Si tu ne m’arrêtes pas,

I’ll hit that shot all day.

 

Dribble, dribble, dribble.

C’est fini après mon score.

On change les équipes,

Or do you want some more?

For or Against Official Models of Multilingualism – The BILD perspective (by Dr. Alison Crump)

From May 5 to 7, many of us BILDers attended a conference at McGill University called “For or Against Official Models of Multiculturalism and Multilingualism.” When we submitted our abstract for the conference, we did so with the BILD Research Group as the author. We had to assure the conference organizers that even though there are 10 of us in the group, we could be treated as a single entity (especially with respect to food ordering for conference attendees). We were quite sure that our talk “Unofficial multilingualism in an intercultural province: Micro-level case studies of policy as lived experience” would bring a different perspective. We were right! We had the great pleasure of closing the conference, in a session perhaps most appropriately called “And now for something completely different.”

Où est mon multilingual newsfeed? (by Michaela Salmon)

I was browsing through Facebook today, when suddenly a post caught my eye. It was the page of a local park that I know posts almost exclusively in French. This time it was only in English. ‘Huh’, I thought, and kept scrolling.

The languages I look like (by Kathleen Green)

I’ve written on this blog before about my experiences as a speaker of French and English and how I feel myself self-categorizing, and being categorized by others, in relation to these two languages. Today, I’m going to add my third language, Mandarin, to the mix. Mandarin is a part of my daily life – these days, it’s present in the music that I listen to, it’s the subject of one of the classes that I teach, and it’s the language that I use to navigate applications on my computer and cell phone.

On Multilingual Research Spaces and Digital Dissemination (by Casey Burkholder)

I have been all over the place lately. I have been just about everywhere but home in Montreal. From January – June of this year, I was living and working in Hong Kong while I completed the fieldwork for my doctoral project, Looking Back and Looking Around: Cellphilming and Revisiting with Ethnic Minority Youth in Hong Kong. The project has taken up a lot of my thinking, and has inspired a few of my previous BILD posts. It continues to inspire my thinking as I move from being in the field with my research participants, to working with them across digital spaces.

Sapir in Montreal (by Patricia Houde)

In this post, I will discuss ideas that emerged while reading Mehdi Babaei’s post as well as the first chapter of Aneta Pavlenko’ (2014) book: The bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and thought. Thanks to Mela Sarkar for recommending it. Since the city of Montreal is at the centerpiece of this reflection, I’d like to provide a brief description as offered by Wikipedia:

«Montréal est la deuxième plus grande ville du Canada et se situe dans le sud de la province du Québec, dont elle est la principale métropole³. Elle est la ville francophone la plus peuplée d’Amérique⁴ et aussi l’une des plus grandes villes francophones du monde. Montréal est considérée comme la quatrième ville francophone au monde après Paris^5,6,7,8. Sa population est trois fois plus nombreuse que celle de la ville de Québec, la capitale de la province⁹. En 2014, la ville comptait 1 988 243 habitants¹⁰ et son aire urbaine plus de quatre millions¹¹. En 2011, environ 50 % de sa population était de langue française, 13 % était de langue anglaise et 33 % était d’une autre langue¹², faisant ainsi de Montréal une des villes les plus cosmopolites du monde¹³.» 

Multilingualism, Translation and Identity (by Mehdi Babaei)

In this post, I will address the question Lauren raised in her post last week: what makes you feel bi/multilingual? First, I will explain how I perceive multilingualism, and then I will present my experience with translation as an example of what makes me feel multilingual. While I find Lauren’s question intriguing, I even have some further questions: what does it mean by bilingualism/multilingualism? If multilingualism refers to someone being able to use or speak several languages, then what level of proficiency serves as an indicator for a person being bi/multilingual: limited, professional, full, or native (native-like)? How is proficiency defined? And more specifically, does the term multilingualism have the same sense in the eyes of those who belong to a language education community (like BILD members) and those who are outside the field?