Conference Agenda

The growing trend of Francophone children attending Anglophone schools right from the nursery level in Cameroon to achieve effective English/French bilingualism has been underresearched. Very few authors like Anchimbe (2005) analyses the impact of this educational trend on the usual Francophone/Anglophone divide of Cameroonians and termed “Anglo-Cameroonians” Francophones who go through Anglophone schools. Though Simo Bobda and Fassé (2015)’s work shows that the Anglophone/Francophone divide is largely considered beyond the sole mastery of English or French to include ethnic origins, the sociopolitical crisis which emerged in 2016 in Anglophone regions fuelled the Anglophone/Francophone divide even more and indicated the need to further dig into language identity in Cameroon. This study probes into the case of a six-member family based in Yaoundé where the Francophone father married an Anglo-Cameroonian and the four children under their care are immersed in Anglophone schools. The family language policy orientations, the functional allocation of the three languages spoken at home (English, French, and Eton), and the (self-)identification patterns of children and parents across the Anglophone/Francophone divide are very telling. The data for the study was collected through the interview of the six family members and analysed through the thematic content method. The study contends that the fast-growing number of Anglo-Cameroonians is yielding unexpected sociolinguistic impact that deeply challenges the usual Anglophone/Francophone divide and faces Anglo-Cameroonians with serious identity issues worth considering in language and educational policy definition and orientation in Cameroon.

References

Anchimbe, Eric A. (2005). Anglophonism and Francophonism: The Stakes of (Official) Language Identity in Cameroon. Alizés : Revue angliciste de La Réunion, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines (Université de La Réunion), 2005, pp.7-26.

Simo Bobda, A & Fasse Mbouya, I (2015). “The Anglophone and Francophone Speech Communities of Cameroon: (Self-) identification, self-Perception and Perception across the Divide”. CJSC, 2(No 2), (268-279).

Based on our expertise in the study of young multilingual children, this methodological presentation aims to provide practical guidance on equitable best practices for researchers and practitioners working with multilingual children and their families in online settings. With increases in global migration, multilingualism is more and more common. In Canada, an estimated 25% of Canadians speak a first language other than English or French (Major, 2022).However, current research practices do not provide insight into multilingual language abilities (e.g., code-switching, translation, translanguaging) or language abilities in the minoritized language. These inequitable practices lead to a deficit framing of multilingual children as perpetual learners of the societal/educational language (MacLeod & Demers, 2023).

As highlighted by United Nations (2022), tele-assessment and digital tools are the future of learning and enhance equitable access to language and literacy development for all children - particularly those facing additional resource, physical, and contextually-specific barriers to in-person access. This includes multilingual children. Tele-assessment is the use of technology to facilitate assessment; this includes researchers and educators who assess children online on oral-language and reading skills (Burchell et al., 2022; Wood et al., 2021). To facilitate research beyond our Canadian borders and enhance linguistic diversity and representation within language and literacy research, we discuss practical strategies stemming from our work with multilingual children in diverse online settings - both in Canada and internationally. Topics include the type of software, equipment, and assessment topics conducive to tele-assessment, considerations for adapting minority-world (e.g., Canadian) research for low-resource majority-world contexts (e.g., Pakistan), strategies for addressing potential resource barriers (e.g., internet and technological limitations), and future directions for developing open-access resources to ensure equitable language and literacy access for multilingual children. By doing so, we seek to equip Canadian researchers with the technical knowledge to conduct methodologically-sound and culturally-responsive research across the globe.

Situated in the theory of Family Language Policy (FLP) (Spolsky, 2004), the study aims to illustrate children's agentive role in home language maintenance in three Polish-British families in Great Britain. To this end, it draws on the conceptual model of child agency consisting of four intersecting dimensions: compliance regimes, linguistic norms, linguistic competence, and generational positioning (Smith-Christmas, 2022). The study provides a nuanced portrait of child agency by juxtaposing parental perceptions and children's views on home language use with an analysis of recorded home interactions. The data obtained from semi-structured interviews and self-recordings (40 hours) were transcribed verbatim and coded according to the Grounded Theory approach. The rich points and recurrent themes were revised and conceptualised through constant comparison. The researched families are of similar socioeconomic status and practice pro-heritage language FLPs. Each family has children aged 7-15. The results show how children's linguistic choices arise from ‘constraining’ and ‘non-constraining’ (Nakamura, 2018) language management strategies and how they are negotiated and co-constructed in intrafamily interactions. Specifically, the results demonstrate (1) how children consciously use their linguistic and paralinguistic resources and various counter-strategies to navigate conversations with caregivers or extend linguistic norms when speaking with siblings and (2) how their attitudes to heritage language affect language dynamics in the home domain.

References:

Nakamura, J. (2018). Parents’ use of discourse strategies in dual-lingual interactions with receptive bilingual children. Crosslinguistic research in monolingual and bilingual speech, 181-200.
Smith‐Christmas, C. (2022). Using a ‘Family Language Policy’ lens to explore the dynamic and relational nature of child agency. Children & Society, 36(3), 354-368.
Spolsky, B. (2004). Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Many children in Quebec grow up multilingually due to the presence of two societal languages, English and French, as well as heritage home languages. Quebec-based parents of school-aged children have expressed a desire for more plurilingualism at school (Langevin, 2022), but plurilingual approaches are rare and often discouraged (e.g., Maatouk & Payant, 2022).

Focusing on Quebec-based families raising multilingual infants and toddlers, this study examines parents’ desires for resources to prepare children for school entry and their concerns regarding children’s future school experiences. These two aspects of family language policy – falling under the remit of language management and language beliefs, respectively (Ahooja et al., 2022; Quirk et al., 2023) – have been the focus of only limited research so far. To address this gap, we conducted a corpus-assisted discourse study – examining frequencies, collocations, concordance lines, and longer discourse segments (see e.g. Vessey, 2017) – based on corpora comprising parents’ responses to two open-ended questions. The first asked about parents’ desires for education-related resources to support their children’s plurilingual development (N=396 responses; French corpus= 3,403 words; English corpus: 5,076 words) and the second asked about their concerns related to their children’s future experiences at school (N=641 responses; French corpus=9,630 words; English corpus=12,502 words). We also investigate how these desires and concerns are shaped by the languages parents are transmitting (societal only or societal plus heritage).

Analyses are ongoing, but initial findings indicate a general desire for more plurilingual support from schools among all parents, and stronger desires and concerns among heritage-language-transmitting parents. Final findings will be discussed in relation to current language and education policies in Quebec, which discourage the use of multiple languages in the classroom, and the interconnectedness of public and family language policies in this context (Ballinger et al., 2022).