Access to French as Second Official Language Programs in English-Dominant Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language policies in any country exist within socio-historical contexts—embedded in history and influenced by socio-political factors. In Canada, such factors were the impetus to the formation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism [RCBB], 1967), which was grounded in an English/French partnership and recommended that Canada become an English/French bilingual country. Although the subsequent Official Languages Act (Department of Justice, 1985) and Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Department of Justice, 1982) limited their focus to first language maintenance, they did recognise second language education as contributing to the equality of status of both official languages. In Canada, however, the impact of second language education is mitigated by the provinces and territories who hold constitutional jurisdiction over education (Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008; Marsh & Willis, 2003). Currently in Canadian schools, policies for access to French as second official language (FSOL) programs range along a continuum from informal to formal. Where some Ministries of Education have developed informal policies that Delaney (2002) described as de facto policies or practices that have become legitimized over time, Loreman (2007) posits that these policies can lead to inconsistencies. On the other end of the continuum, some Ministries of Education have formal policies that have been developed through a formulation process that includes input by stakeholders before adoption of the policy (Delaney, 2002). As it pertains to access to FSOL education, the provinces and territories have not used their authority to create many formal policies. Such an absence of direction is a variable contributing to the inconsistent and inequitable access to FSOL education (Mady & Arnett, 2009; Mady & Turnbull, 2010) where formal policies may be the most effective starting point to achieving more equitable access (Conrick & Regan, 2007; Cooper, Fusarelli, & Randall, 2004). In addition to governments, language organizations also attempt to influence second language education. Canadian Parents for French (CPF), the sponsor of this research, is one such organization. With its view to improve FSOL, CPF identifies 11 criteria on which to judge equitability of access (CPF, 2010). It is these criteria that form the observation schema of this study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".