Canada is an officially bilingual country with English and French sharing equal status (Government of Canada, 1985); however, except for Quebec, French is a minority language in most provinces and territories. This results in an asymmetrical relationship in the status of both English and French in the country, as each province has its own approach to bilingualism. Ontario, the province with the highest number of francophones outside Quebec, reflects this unequal status which favors the pervasiveness of English across contexts. York University is located in Toronto, it has Glendon College as its official bilingual faculty. Glendon's official bilingualism is formalized by the partial designation of York University under the French Language Services Act (Government of Ontario, 1990) where Glendon College is recognized as a French-language service provider. Moreover, since its inception, bilingualism has always been central to Glendon's mission and identity. However, there remains an ongoing and productive debate about how bilingualism ought to be defined, what it means conceptually and practically, and more importantly how best it should be implemented academically, especially in the context of a evolving university landscape.
This is the problematic that we will discuss in our presentation. More specifically, we will focus on how critical applied linguistics (CAL) (Pennycook, 2022) can inform the creation and enactment of a redesigned language in education policy at Glendon College, an institution founded on official bilingualism but located in one of the most multicultural cities in the world and thus serving students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, including indigenous students. CAL can be understood as an approach to language education and language policy that addresses social inequities and examines how language and power are imbricated.
An analysis of the ideologies behind Glendon's current language in education policy based on official bilingualism is fundamental to understand the necessity of a major paradigm shift embracing plurilingualism. Our reflection and proposal with respect to Glendon's language in education policy question the idea of the two official settler languages being taught as two solitudes, which in our view is an obstacle to the integration of anglophone and francophone communities in Canada. Within the process of redesigning our faculty's academic architecture of bilingualism, we raised questions about commonly held nativespeakerist assumptions, introduced translanguaging and plurilingualism (Wei & Garcia, 2022) as well as the imperative to move beyond official bilingualism to adopt a decolonial approach to language in education policy. This is done with the intention of addressing the existing asymmetries that often translate into inequities between student populations from diverse from different linguistic backgrounds.
Bibliography
Government of Canada (1985). Official Languages Act. Retrieved from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/o-3.01/
Government of Ontario. (1990). French Language Services Act. Retrieved from https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90f32
Pennycook, A. (2022). Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, vol. 19, n0 1, 1-21.
Wei, L., & García, O. (2022). Not a First Language but one Repertoire: Translanguaging as a Decolonizing Project. RELC Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882221092841
