Multilingualism in Canadian schools: Myths, realities and possibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bilingualism and multiculturalism have for four decades been official ideolo-gies and policies in Canada but, as is often the case, the implementation and outcomes of such government policies nationally are less impressive than the rhetoric would suggest. This article reviews the political, theoretical and de-mographic contexts justifying support for the learning and use of additional languages in contemporary Canadian society and schools, and summarizes research demonstrating that bilingualism and multilingualism are indeed cog-nitively, socially, and linguistically advantageous for children (and adults), as well as for society. The five studies in this special issue are then pre-viewed with respect to the following themes that run across them: (1) the potential for bilingual synergies and transformations in language awareness activities and crosslinguistic knowledge construction; (2) the role of multi-literacies and multimodality in mediated learning; and (3) the interplay of positioning, identity, and agency in language learning by immigrant youth. The article concludes that more Canadian schools and educators must, like
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".