Language Background Profiling at Canadian Elementary Schools and Dominant Language Constellations

Abstract

In a global world of unprecedented migrations and superdiversity, awareness and encouragement of bilingual and multilingual practices are also on the rise. In many contexts, children’s language repertoires can be varied and complex and the notion of a Dominant Language Constellation, a core set of languages highly relevant in an individual’s daily life, can apply from an early age. This chapter focuses on language background profiling at elementary schools in Canada. Such profiling is typically done at initial school entry to inform schools as well as larger regional and provincial educational authorities about the potential diversity, use of and proficiency in different languages by the incoming cohorts (and their families). School registration forms thus typically include questions about children’s first, home, primary, additional, etc. languages. The formulations, number, and combinations of questions may vary to a large degree from one school district to another, and also from province to province. Analysis of such questions can be revealing in terms of educational and societal assumptions and orientations to bi/multilingualism, and in terms of general views of language. I offer a discussion of the notion of a native speaker and certain monolingual norms that ensue from it and can be seen in language background profiling practices at schools. Then, building on previous work and incorporating new data, I provide a general summary of the questions used in a large sample of registration forms from various schools and boards in five Canadian provinces. I situate these within the context of recent multilingual frameworks such as plurilingualism, multicompetence and translanguaging, and then focus specifically on the notion of a Dominant Language Constellation, arguing that its premises may entail benefits for the conceptualization of language background profiling.