Comprehensive national surveys of primary schools were conducted in nine Francophone West African countries in 2014. These surveys include information on private tutoring which enables in-depth analysis to be undertaken of both the overall incidence of tutoring provision among primary school students and teachers. The main conclusion of this study…

In this paper, I explore Discourses [Gee 1996. "Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses." 2nd Edition, 1996; 3rd Edition, 2008; 5th Edition. 2015. London: Taylor & Francis] on language, and how they influenced plurilingual students' subject positioning during classroom interactions. I analyse documents published by…

New Caledonia is a French overseas territory in the South Pacific with a long history of differing attitudes towards independence (Fisher, 2019). The local government aims to challenge French cultural hegemony by building a "New Caledonian School" (Gouvernement de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2016). That is, a school in which students are…

French second language education, including the option of one-way French immersion, is mandated for majority-language Anglophone children in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province. Language ideological debates in the province surrounding official English--French bilingualism led us to investigate adolescent majority-language…

French immersion (FI), one of the hallmarks of French as a Second Language education in Canada and mandated in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially English/French bilingual province, is often the target of language ideological debates surrounding its purposes and expected outcomes. Yet, notably absent in FI scholarship has been a focus on the…

This paper analyses the participatory space for political debate opened up by social media in Vanuatu with reference to the implementation of a recent language-in-education policy, jointly funded by the governments of Vanuatu, Australia and New Zealand. Although Vanuatu appears to have been debating the same language issues for several decades,…

Differences between monolingual and multilingual vocabulary development have been observed but few studies provide a longitudinal perspective on vocabulary development before and following school entry. This study compares vocabulary growth profiles of 106 multilingual children to 211 monolingual peers before and after school entry to examine…

The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people [Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016 Accessed January 4, 2016. http://vnso.gov.vu/] and more than 100 indigenous…

French immersion programs in Saskatchewan have traditionally served to further the goals of additive bilingualism between Canada's two official languages, French and English. Whereas these programs have historically consisted of predominantly Anglophone populations, recent trends in immigration have contributed to the increasingly diverse…

In Canada, there is a rising population of K-12 students who speak neither French nor English at home, and who are sometimes expected to learn both of the country's official languages in school. Applying the lenses of critical theory and positioning theory, this study uses questionnaire and interview data to frame considerations to explore how…

This paper presents the results of a study that compared the French as a second official achievement of three groups of students: (1) Canadian-born English speaking (CBE), (2) Canadian-born multilingual (CBM), and (3) immigrant multilinguals (IMM) as determined by multiskills test results. ANOVAs and subsequent post hoc tests revealed that the…

This paper examines French as a second official language (FSOL) teachers' perspectives as they relate to the inclusion of immigrants who are learning English (IMMs), in elementary FSOL education in an English-dominant region of Canada, in particular within French immersion. In this paper, I have tried to examine the question of access to…

Social psychologists have suggested that language-based ideologies related to "stereotype threat" (i.e. variations in performance-based on ability perceptions of language groups) may affect students' academic achievement regardless of school language support. However, it is unclear whether efforts to support students' first language…

Drawing on Language Awareness (LA) approaches developed for francophone classrooms and a sociocultural theoretical perspective on language and learning that posits the genesis of new knowledge construction is situated in social interactions and shaped by socio-historical context, we conducted a small-scale case study of the implementation of LA…

Since Reunification of French Cameroon and British Cameroons in 1961, the country has adopted French and English as its joint official languages and recommended the promotion of bilingualism in these two foreign languages in official domains. This paper focuses on the primary school level in the francophone sub system of education and examines the…