The Prism of Children's Plurilingualism: A Multi-site Inquiry with Children as Co-researchers across English and French Schools in Toronto and Montpellier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through this multi-site study of children’s plurilingualism, I asked what we would discover about plurilingualism by positioning children as co-ethnographers of their plurilingual lives and what teaching might look like if it were based on a plurilingual rather than a monolingual paradigm. During a 4-month collaboration with four different English and French school models in Toronto, Canada and one bilingual school in Montpellier, France, children documented their plurilingual and pluricultural experiences: they took photos of their literacy practices at school and at home and classified them by theme to analyze the linguistic landscape around them and to reflect collaboratively on language policies that manage different spaces. Based on reflexive techniques such as drawing, creative writing and collage, students represented their plurilingualism by creating a series of individual and collective "identity texts" (Cummins Early, 2011). Creative arts-informed methods were used to allow children to express their views without being limited to the language of instruction (Molinié, 2009; Auger, 2010). In addition, these reflexive techniques scaffolded students’ engagement as co-researchers by enabling them to creatively co-construct new knowledge and represent their perspectives. Five key elements emerged as being foundational for teaching in the 21st century through the prism of students’ plurilingualism: 1) a vision of all students as ever-evolving plurilingual learners; 2) a purposeful inclusion of the full range of students’ communicative repertoires; 3) collaboration among teachers, students, families and the wider community, often supported by technology; 4) valuing creativity by building time, space for the creative expression of academic work; 5) adopting an inquiry-based approach to language and literacy learning. This research contributes to an understanding of the complexity of children’s plurilingualism, as well as to the development of a didactique of plurilingualism in mainstream classrooms that is both culturally responsive and linguistically inclusive.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".