Official Bilingualism and Immigrants: Perceptions, Experiences and Practices
Date
2013-05-02
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Abstract
Canada has been known as a country that is bilingual when it comes to language policy and multicultural when it comes to cultural diversity. However, while the immigration numbers have been increasing in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2012), newcomers are often seen to be left out of the scope of discussion on languages (Dasko, 2003; Parkin & Turcotte, 2004). In fact, the discourse and research on official bilingualism have largely been shaped by promoting bilingualism only among Anglophone and Francophone communities (Mady, 2008). In this study, I investigated the perceptions, experiences, and practices of 64 adult immigrant students learning one of Canada’s official languages (English or French) with regard to bilingualism in Alberta and Canada. By analyzing survey findings on participants’ perceptions of bilingualism and in-depth open-ended individual and focus-group interviews, I attempted to answer how the promoted official bilingualism and the dominant English reality are reconciled and explained and how immigrants’ voices are placed in the discourses on bilingualism in the monolingual and multicultural environment. Following a critical sociolinguistic framework (Heller, 2006), I argue it is the interplay between official bilingualism and bilingualism as a social practice that characterizes and guides immigrants’ narrations of how they place themselves in discourses of bilingualism. I demonstrate that often a macro-level discourse on official bilingualism maintained and promoted by the government does not correlate with a micro-level discourse produced by new Canadians, and I recommend further consideration of accommodating immigrants’ voices in the official bilingualism discourse.
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Education--Bilingual and Multicultural, Linguistics
Citation
Galiev, A. (2013). Official Bilingualism and Immigrants: Perceptions, Experiences and Practices (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27164