Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: exploring the creation of plurilingual ‘identity texts’ in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier

In an age of transnational mobility, there has been a growing recognition of the need for both English and French mainstream classroom teachers to be trained to teach increasingly plurilingual student populations. In this article, I begin by describing the context for an exploratory comparative and collaborative ethnographic action research study in four English and French schools in Toronto, Canada and one school in Montpellier, France that engaged children as co-researchers of their lived plurilingualism. I analyse in particular the process of creating plurilingual multimodal books with students and teachers across the five different school cases. This paper focuses on the iterative ‘identity text’ creation process across all five schools by examining one plurilingual identity text from each case, along with students’ research conversations about their creative productions, and interviews with their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, I summarize five features of inclusive plurilingual pedagogy that emerged across the five cases and call for further collaborative research across English and French schools and scholarly communities investigating creative plurilingual language and literacy production in the twenty-first century.     

大学生多元识读能力影响因素调查

在信息多样化的网络时代,传统以语言文字为主的单模态意义建构模式已不能满足人际交流的需求。采用多模态化的教学模式,培养学生的多元识读能力,是新媒介时代对语言教学提出的迫切要求。通过实证研究,调查和分析大学生英语多元识读能力的各种影响因素,能够为设计多模态英语课堂,快速提高大学生英语识读水平提供一定的理论指导和实践范例。实验结果表明:学生的数字识读水平、校外识读水平和多模态识读水平共同决定了其英语多元识读能力。据此,可以通过学习内容和教学互动的多模态化来帮助学生提高多元识读能力。