Jumping Through Hoops in the Canadian Immigration System: A Critical View of the Immigrant's Journey to Citizenship

Abstract

AbstractLanguage assessment for citizenship is a ubiquitous enforced and enacted policy in several developed countries (e.g., Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands, to name a few). In this regard, language testers have expressly argued that this practice enacts injustice for and adds hurdles to marginalized immigrant groups (McNamara & Shohamy, 2009; Shohamy, 2009). Nevertheless, language proficiency tests remain a critical, high‐stakes criterion in evaluating immigrants' permanent residence and naturalization applications. To this end, language tests used for immigration and citizenship purposes are often aligned with widely recognized language frameworks such as the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Chen & Flasko, 2020) and the Common European Framework of Reference (Lim, Geranpayeh, Khalifa, & Buckendahl, 2013). In turn, these alignment studies idealize, in subtle ways, new Canadians with language proficiency requirements that would make them worthy of permanent residence or citizenship. Knowledge of society tests plays an essential role in immigrants' journey to citizenship and can also be considered tests of reading proficiency. This study focuses on the enacted Canadian language policy for prospective immigrants and citizens, adopting a corpus‐assisted discourse analytic approach (Taylor & Marchi, 2018) to the study guide for the Canadian citizenship test (Discover Canada: The rights and responsibilities of citizenship). A primary focus is examining how official and nonofficial languages are represented within this document. The findings highlight some of the problematic assumptions that underpin the use of monolingual constructs in tests encountered in the journey to permanent residence and Canadian citizenship.