École francophone et bi/plurilinguisme en Colombie Britannique

The general aim of the study is a contribution to a better understanding of a new educational context. In the two classrooms where the researcher is also a teacher, we have documented, through ethnographic recordings of classroom interactions and field-notes, 57 secondary schools students’ contacts with a variety of languages in their families, communities and at school; in-depth interviews and classroom observations also focused attention on 7 of them. We describe linguistic and social interaction in the classroom, in an attempt to investigate whether attention to students’ multilingual biographies and diverse experiences could help contextualize an educational approach more respectful of plurality and diversity. The study is grounded in contemporary theories of bilinguism and multilingualism, multilingual literacies. Five themes have emerged from the analysis: 1) language biographies; 2) boundaries between formal and informal context; 3) multilingual competences in literacy; 4) construction of plurality in teaching; 5) observable classroom sequences.