Grant program: Multilingual Classroom

Grant recipient: Isabelle Côté, Faculty of Education

Project team: Monica Tang, Faculty of Education, Magali Forte, research assistant

Timeframe: June 2019 to August 2020

Funding: $5215

Courses addressed:

• EDUC 400 – Foundations of Education and Schooling

Description: We will be offering a 3-hour/week tutorial to student teachers in the French module in PDP, who are assessed at intermediate and upper intermediate levels of French competency. These tutorials or CLIC (Competency in Language – Integration to Content) blocks will serve two major goals: 1) to support student language learning needs and 2) to support student development of a positive and legitimate professional identity as future French educators in the K-12 BC Education system.

By supporting their language learning needs, we will hopefully improve their capacity to thrive in their professional teacher training at SFU. Ultimately, the strategies would be transferable in their future professional practice with their students.  In addition, by supporting their development of a positive and legitimate identity as future French educators, we will hopefully enable them to persist as French educators in the K-12 BC education system. Currently, the attrition rate among French immersion teachers is quite high. This research project will investigate student teachers language competencies and professional identity within their professional teacher training at SFU.  

Questions addressed:

• Do student-teachers develop a positive identity as French teachers over the course of two semesters?
• How do intermediate and upper intermediate students perceive the usefulness of the various language learning strategies learned in CLIC?
• To what extent do the intermediate and upper intermediate students improve their French oral interactive proficiency?
• How does the faculty associate perceive the level of interaction between intermediate and upper intermediate students and the rest of the group? What is the evolution of this interaction?
• How do the intermediate and upper intermediate students perceive their level of interaction with the rest of the group and its evolution?

Knowledge sharing: A preliminary report has been shared with the PDP Director and the assistant director in January 2020. With the positive impact of this first iteration of the CLIC pilot project, it was then decided with PDP and OFFA to offer a second iteration for Fall 2020.
The findings were also shared in April 2020 with the EDUC 404 instructors who are teaching the Designs for Learning courses (taught in French) in Summer 2020.

We are working on publishing an article in French or in English (some options : Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity (J-BILD) , Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée, Revue canadienne de l’éducation, Cahiers de l’ILOB, Revue canadienne des langues vivantes, etc.)

Keywords: second language identity; second language competency; pre-service teacher identity; French Immersion; bilingualism; power dynamics; community; agency