Canadian Language Research Articles

Developing Communicative Competence of Tertiary Level Engineering Students through De Bono’s Lateral Thinking Tool Design

Lateral thinking is a unique form of thinking proposed by Edward De Bono. He believes that innovation is the ability to see the changes as an opportunity not as a threat. It results in the generation of new ideas and breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas. This type of thinking decides the outcome of one's speaking and the job of lateral thinking is to enable the brain to find multiple possibilities or perceptions. The attitude of the present set of tertiary learners, lack of confidence and positive approach, their habits hinder their brain to intake, create and present the information in the demanding context. The major reasons for their inability are the cultural and psychological background of the learners. Developing lateral thinking skills of the tertiary level learners may pave the way to keep a constructive mind to acquire new language competencies. 'Think out of the box' is the crucial motto of the language teachers these days. De Bono's concept of Lateral thinking would enable the language teachers to break a new ground in inculcating speaking skills for the learners of English as a second language. The present study proposes Design , one of the lateral thinking techniques of Bono and its effectiveness as a tool that can be adapted by the language teachers to enrich the communicative competence of the tertiary level learners of English as a second language. The criteria for speaking activity are assessed based on stage III of Canadian Language Benchmark for assessing speaking skills.

Intangible Culture on Inland Seas, from Hudson Bay to Canadian Heritage

The author of this article examines the ways in which theConvention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritageconsiders the protection of aboriginal languages and provides a case study of the challenges of the preservation of the Cree language in Canada. For Indigenous people, in Canada as elsewhere, questions arise about who speaks for whom; many of their constituents may not identify with the major political organizations that represent their interests to governments and are recognized by government agencies; and other structural and logistical barriers also arise. The paper takes a look at the richness of Aboriginal history around Hudson Bay as held in language and stories, and then discusses the many challenges that a Hudson Bay Cree storyteller, Louis Bird, and his collaborators faced in pursuing an oral history project funded by a Canadian governmental agency with its own parameters and priorities.

Art autochtone : langue, oralité, communication

Native languages in Canada are closely tied to memory and territory. Their weakening or disappearance, along with the decrease of the oral transmission of knowledge, has therefore directly impacted the set of semiotic and epistemological codes on which cultures rest. Split between their language of origin and the country’s majority languages, and lacking any political or legislative leverage, communities have progressively lost their means to self-fulfillment. In the Canadian linguistic divide, French-speaking Native communities have found themselves doubly marginalized. Today, artistic creations play a crucial role in the renewal of movements focused on transmission, mediation, and dialogue; they make the unspoken visible and open up new possibilities of expression. For the artists, speaking the language and referring to its reality is an act through which the collective imagination is reclaimed and a spatial and historical anchoring is reactivated. The contributors to this journal’s latest and decidedly polemical section examine these realities and lift the veil on certain lines of thought that have been ignored or too quickly discarded.

Language policy in Japanese ethnic churches in Canada and the legitimization of church member identities

This paper is aimed at understanding the language policy of Japanese ethnic churches and the legitimization of church member identities in the midst of dominant languages in Canada. While church members often construct Japanese ethnic Christian churches with ‘grassroots’ language policies that seem to legitimize their Japanese language and cultural identities and practices, their membership to their churches and their Christian faith often leads them to experiencing legitimization as Christians in solidarity with other Christians in the world (Takamizawa in Torch Trinity J 4(4):34–45, 2001). Using theoretical descriptions of language planning and policy, I discuss the scholarship of ethnic church studies, kokusaika and nihonjinron discourses, and groupism as described in frame theory (Nakane in Japanese society. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1970), as a framework to contextualize church member experiences and perceptions in the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of language policy of Japanese ethnic churches in Canada. I use Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough in Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. Routledge, London, 2003) to analyze relevant language policies and interview texts that reveal the perceptions of Japanese ethnic Christian church members from three churches in Western Canada.

Landscapes of the Irish Language: Discursive Constructions of Authenticity in the Irish Diaspora

Almost 2 million people in the North and South of Ireland identify as Irish speakers and an estimated 70 million around the globe can claim Irish heritage. While Irish ancestry may be distant for many, the Irish language is active in numerous locations in the diaspora, as documented in research profiling communities across the globe (e.g. Callahan, 1994; Garland 2008; Giles 2016; Kallen 1984, 1994; Noone, 2012a; O hEadhra, 1998;O Conchubhair 2008; Walsh & NiDhuda 2015 inter alia) and evidenced by the existence of many cultural and language groups. Census figures indicate that at least25,000 people currently speak the language in Canada, the United States and Australia alone (Statistics Canada, 2013; United States Census Bureau, 2015; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012), yet very few in-depth general accounts of Irish-language use in the diaspora exist. Linguistic practices within Irish communities worldwide vary widely with regard to Irish-language use and language ideologies, with each community subject to distinct concerns, histories and discourses. As such, each has distinct possibilities for creating social and cultural meaning, possibilities that are fundamentally shaped by the socio-cultural and politico-historical contexts within which the Irish language has existed in the last 200 years. This paper investigates how the Irish language is recruited in constructions of cultural authenticity in three sites in the Irish diaspora: Boston, U.S.; Melbourne, Australia; and St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. Research is based on open-ended qualitative interviews with 41 learners and speakers regarding the Irish language and their own language practices, and in extensive participant observation of cultural and language-related activities in each site. Thematic content analysis of interview data provides the basis for ethnographic descriptions of each site. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse (e.g. Pennycook, 1994; Foucault, 1981, 1972) affords the identification and delineation of predominant discourses within which Irish-language use is implicated as a meaningful social act, and that are enacted or actively resisted within and across communities, as well as key subject positions made available within these discourses. This approach provides the basis for an exploration of (i) the processes of authenticating a cultural practice within discourse; (ii) how such processes shape the changing configurations of who is included and who is excluded within dominant politico-cultural discourses; and (iii) the various formations of community that exist within and across the diaspora space. The paper shows that the role of the Irish language in authenticating Irish cultural identity is subject to reworkings across time and space, as exemplified in the variety of local meanings it has taken on across the three diaspora sites featured.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BRITISH SPEECH PROSODY ON THE FORMATION OF PROSODIC NORM OF CANADIAN ENGLISH

The English language in Canada occupies the dominant position. Both British and American English influenced the formation of Canadian English, which has undergone a long historical process. According to the latest census survey the population of contemporary Canada is devided into 3 linguistic groups: anglophones – those whose native language is English; frankophones – whose native language is French and allophones – Canadians whose native is some other language. The aim of the given paper is to analyse which peculiarities of the British pronouncing system influence and are reflected on prosodic characteristics of anglophones’ speech. The tasks of the paper included the distribution of terminal tones and scales and the character of syntagmatic devision in the speech of the analysed groups of informants. The conducted investigation revealed definite specific character of the speech of Anglophones, where the peculiarities of British prosody – the frequency of low falling nuclear tone and Descending Stepping Head influenced the formation of Canadian intonational system.This statement is based on the earlier received data about the frequency of intonational Scalеs and terminal tones in the works of native and foreign linguists.

СТРУКТУРНОСЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ДЕРОГАТИВНО МАРКИРОВАННЫХ ЭТНОНИМОВ КАНАДСКОГО, АВСТРАЛИЙСКОГО И НОВОЗЕЛАНДСКОГО ВАРИАНТОВ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

Tsebrovskaya Tatyana Alexandrovna – lecturer of the department of foreign languages No3. Institute of Foreign Philology of Taurida Academy (structural department) of V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University. Abstract . The article studies word formation of the derogatory marked ethnonyms (DME) of the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English Language. DME are classified according to the method of word formation, the type of semantic transfer and deliberate phonetic distortion. Selection of the analyzed units is made out of such lexicographical sources as online dictionary of colloquial vocabulary Urban Dictionary, online dictionary Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online: Dictionary and Thesaurus, ABBYY Lingvo, The Free Dictionary, Dictionary.com, electronic databases The Racial slur Database and Hatebase, lists of ethnonyms from online resources canadaka.com, fact-index.com and other sources of factual materials. The urgent character of the given article is caused by lack of scientific study of the ways of word formation of DME, particularly, the units of Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English. Separation of the criteria of their description and division into groups are considered to be important. The aim is to justify the linguistic phenomenon of DME through determining their structural and semantic characteristics in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English. Achievement of the aim requires solving the following problems: 1) to identify the structural and semantic parameters of formation of DME; 2) to improve the structural and semantic classification of A.I. Hryshchenko for Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English. Key words: derogatory marked ethnonym, structural-semantic classification, word formation, semantic transfer, phonetic distortion, Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English .

The Politics of Language Roadmaps in Canada: Understanding the Conservative Government's Approach to Official Languages

AbstractThis article critically examines the Conservative government's approach to official languages, through a policy instrument framework. Special attention is paid to the third federal roadmap for official languages—the first having been unveiled by the Liberal government in 2003 and the second by the Conservative minority government in 2008—and how this roadmap conveys a new representation of official languages in relation to Canadian identity and citizenship. The focus on the linguistic integration of new immigrants in the 2013 language roadmap generates interest. The policy instrument framework also shows how language roadmaps represent the fourth generation of official language policies in Canada; the first three generations found their respective bases in the 1969Official Languages Act, theCharter of Rights and Freedomsand the 1988Official Languages Act. The article concludes that an analysis of language roadmaps elucidates transformations initiated by the Conservative governments in the area of official languages in Canada. It also promotes further exploration and analysis of language policies through the policy instrument framework.

Engaging the hidden curriculum within the Canadian Language Benchmarks (2000 and 2012) as a complicated conversation

This article examines the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Pawlikowska-Smith, 2000; Hajer and Kaskens 2012) within the context of national second language programming. I argue that students and teachers can view such documents as hidden curriculum with which they can engage as complicated conversations (Pinar, 2012).

Les compétences en français : Agentivité et motivation des étudiants universitaires

L’agence de recrutement de l’Université de St-Boniface, petite université francophone de l’Ouest canadien, cherche à recruter des étudiantes et étudiants au sein de ses programmes de 1er cycle auprès des écoles d’immersion française, des écoles françaises ainsi que des collectivités d’immigrants francophones. Cependant, un pourcentage important des étudiants admis éprouve des difficultés relatives aux compétences linguistiques.Les résultats préliminaires de ma recherche qualitative fondée sur une série d’entretiens avec des étudiants allophones, anglophones et francophones révèlent une « responsabilisation linguistique » des apprenants grâce à l’intégration de certains éléments du Portfolio canadien des langues pour enseignants (CASLT/ACPLS, 2010) dans le cadre du cours de rattrapage, Français 1001 : Grammaire de l’écrit. Les répercussions sur l’encadrement linguistique des étudiants, la formation initiale des enseignants de langue et le rôle primordial des écoles secondaires sont mis en valeur dans ce rapport.

Newcomer Civic Participation: The Alliance Homework Club and the Integration of Next Generation Youth in Ottawa

Through the analysis of ethnographic data collected in a homework club serving children of immigrant families, this article reports on a less documented mode of newcomer civic participation that is non-institutional and unrelated to government. Indeed, contrary to other clubs included in a larger study, the one discussed here is positioned by its organisers as outside the race for subsidies. Participation in this race entails that organisations such as theirs are accountable to and must frame objectives, which are amenable to those of funding agencies. We find that this parallel mode of participation is based on long-term objectives of immigrant community integration into the host community, most notably through the educational success of their children. Thus, the club presented here is at the intersection of two previously documented newcomer integration strategies: civic participation and investment in the next generation. This is the first study to document such a crossroads. Dans le cadre d’un plus vaste projet de recherche portant sur les clubs de devoirs en langue française dans la Ville d’Ottawa (Ontario, Canada), nous présentons ici une ethnographie menée dans un club sur une période d’un an. Ce club a été mis sur pied par un groupe de parents issus de l’immigration et renseigne sur un mode de participation sociale non institutionnel de nouveaux arrivants. Peu d’études documentent ce genre d’initiatives qui se déploient en périphérie des initiatives formelles et institutionnelles. Contrairement à plusieurs autres clubs et initiatives, les moniteurs et organisateurs de ce club ne sont pas à la recherche de financements des gouvernements et cherchent plutôt à travailler auprès des jeunes, sans avoir à s’insérer dans un mode de fonctionnement formel. Ce mode de participation permet à ces derniers de poursuivre l’objectif d’une meilleure intégration des membres de leur communauté dans la société d’accueil à travers la réussite scolaire des enfants. Le club de devoirs présenté se situe à l’intersection de deux stratégies déployées par les nouveaux arrivants : participation sociale et investissement dans la deuxième génération. Il s’agit ici d’une des premières études à documenter ce type de processus.

Educating Adults for Citizenship: Critiquing Adequate Language Practices and Canada’s Citizenship Test

In 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) implemented a requirement that all aspiring Canadians who wish to take the Citizenship Test must have an adequate level of English or French language skills, defined as Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) 4. The CLB 4 language policy directly and, we argue, problematically links language abilities with the right to citizenship for new immigrants, and relatedly, assumes a deficit conception of literacy. We examine the discourses embedded within the citizenship study guide, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (2012), the new language requirement policy, and the CIC website in order to expose how these place problematic restrictions on new immigrants who aspire to become Canadian.

Beginning reading interventions for children and adolescents with intellectual disability

BACKGROUND Historically, students with intellectual disability were not expected to learn to read, and thus were excluded from reading instruction. Over the past decades, societal expectations for this group of learners have changed in that children and adolescents with intellectual disability are now expected to be provided with, and benefit from, literacy instruction. This shift in societal expectations has also led to an increase in research examining effective interventions for increasing beginning reading skills for students with intellectual disability. OBJECTIVES To assess the effectiveness of interventions for teaching beginning reading skills to children and adolescents with intellectual disability. SEARCH METHODS We searched the following electronic databases up to October 2019: CENTRAL; MEDLINE, including Epub Ahead of Print and In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations, Embase, 13 other databases, and two trials registers. We contacted authors of included studies, examined reference lists, and used Google Scholar to search for additional studies. SELECTION CRITERIA We included randomized controlled trials (including trials that use quasi-random methods of allocation such as date of birth), involving children and adolescents with intellectual disability (defined as an intelligence quotient (IQ) two standard deviations or more below the population mean) between the ages of 4 and 21 years, that evaluated the efficacy of a beginning reading intervention compared to a control intervention, including no treatment control, wait-list control, treatment as usual, attention control, or alternate non-reading instruction control. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two review authors independently screened titles and abstracts yielded by the search against the inclusion criteria, and extracted data from each trial using a piloted data extraction form to collect information about the population, intervention, randomization methods, blinding, sample size, outcome measures, follow-up duration, attrition and handling of missing data, and methods of analysis. When data were missing, one review author contacted the study authors to request additional information. Two review authors assessed the risk of bias of each included study and rated the quality of the evidence using the GRADE approach (a systematic method for rating the certainty of evidence in meta-analyses). We conducted random-effect meta-analyses, with inverse-variance weighting to combine effect sizes for each of our primary and secondary outcomes. We presented effect sizes as standardized mean differences (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). MAIN RESULTS We identified seven studies involving 352 children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities that met the inclusion criteria. All studies provided the intervention in school settings. Four studies were conducted in the USA, one in Canada, and two in the UK. Three studies were funded by grants from the US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences; one study by the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network and the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation; and three studies did not indicate a funding source. We identified some concerns with risk of bias, mainly due to the difficulty of blinding of participants and personnel, and the lack of blinding of outcome assessors. Meta-analyses of the data demonstrated small-to-moderate effects of beginning reading interventions delivered to children and adolescents with intellectual disability across four dependent variables. We found medium effect sizes in favor of the beginning reading interventions for the primary outcomes of phonologic awareness (SMD 0.55, 95% CI 0.23 to 0.86; 4 studies, 178 participants; moderate-quality evidence), word reading (SMD 0.54, 95% CI 0.05 to 1.03; 5 studies, 220 participants; moderate-quality evidence), and decoding (SMD 0.40, 95% CI 0.12 to 0.67; 5 studies, 230 participants; low-quality evidence). The studies reported no adverse events. We also found a moderate effect for the secondary outcomes of oral reading fluency (SMD 0.65, 95% CI -0.12 to 1.42; 2 studies, 84 participants; low-quality evidence) and language skills (SMD 0.28, 95% CI 0.03 to 0.54; 3 studies, 222 participants; moderate-quality evidence). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Results from this review provide evidence that beginning reading interventions that include elements of phonologic awareness, letter sound instruction, and decoding, delivered to children and adolescents with intellectual disability, are associated with small-to-moderate improvements in phonologic awareness, word reading, decoding, expressive and receptive language, and oral reading fluency. These findings are aligned with previously conducted studies that examined the effects of reading interventions for people without intellectual disability.

Multilingual Novels as Transnational Literature: Yann Martel’s Self

Yann Martel’s experimental novel Self (1996) recounts the story of a young man’s gender transformation as he negotiates his national and linguistic identity through cosmopolitan and multilingual affiliations. To convey the tropes of mobility and flexibility, the novel juxtaposes English and several other languages in parallel columns, inviting comparisons across discrete linguistic and literary traditions. Conceptualized from the start as a multilingual novel, Self challenges monolingual ways of classifying national literature and raises questions about plurilingual texts’ placement in literary canons, their implied readers, and their translation into other languages. This article draws on recent debates about transnationalism to read Self as a novel whose formal strategies require a mode of reading predicated on comparison and translation. Readers are encouraged to simultaneously conceive of distinct languages relationally and uncover the hegemonic relationship between global and local languages in Canada and internationally. Through its formal aesthetics, which underscores both the opportunities and limits of multilingualism, Martel’s polyglot novel contributes valuable insights to current discussions of transnational literature.

Hybrid Languages in Canada Involving French

Valdman et al. (2005) claims there exist two mixed languages involving French in North America: Michif – a blend of French and Cree – and Chiac – a blend of French and English. The purpose of this article is to compare the sociolinguistic history as well as the linguistic structures of these two linguistic entities in order to show that even though there are a number of interesting similarities between the two, their histories, and more importantly their structures, show that Michif and Chiac are not to be considered as belonging to the same linguistic class. Michif is a true Bilingual Mixed Language (Thomason, 1997) while Chiac has not yet attained the status of an independent language and should more rightly be considered as a “fossilized mixed code” (Winford, 2003).

Citizenship and race in second-language education

This article explores the links between citizenship and race in second-language education through an examination of the ways in which citizenship is linked to English language proficiency within a key Canadian federal adult English as a Second Language assessment document, the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). It uses data and updates the analysis from a previously treated study that compared the way in which citizenship was conceptualised within that document with a sampling of adult second-language learners in a federally funded ESL programme. The participants in the study from which these data are drawn described becoming Canadians predominantly in terms of human rights, multicultural policy, and the obligations of being citizens. The CLB, however, rarely referred to citizenship in these terms. Instead, it described being Canadian in terms of normative standards, including various forms of social behaviour, which implied the existence of a dominant and singular culture to which second-language learners had to conform. This article argues that these normative standards have the effect of racialising second-language learners in this context.

Teaching Pragmatic Competence: A Journey from Teaching Cultural Facts to Teaching Cultural Awareness

Pragmatic competence is one of the essential competences taught in the second language classroom. The Canadian Language Benchmarks (CCLB, 2012a), the standard document referred to in any federally funded program of ESL teach- ing in Canada, acknowledges the importance of this competence, yet at the same time notes the limited resources available to help ESL teachers address it in the classroom. Informed by the theoretical construct of communicative competence and its application to second language learning, the article offers an exemplar of the whats and hows of teaching pragmatics in the ESL classroom. The article stresses the importance of making explicit to the learners the sociolinguistic and sociocultural variables that underlie native speakers’ linguistic choices. It is hoped that ESL learners will thus develop a better understanding of the reasons that make native speakers choose one linguistic expression rather than others when performing a certain linguistic act. The speech act of complimenting is used here as an exemplar.

Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada

This paper examines how the concept and framework of food sovereignty has been incorporated in food policy agendas across diverse sectors of Canadian society, particularly in the work and discourse of the National Farmers Union, Québec's Union Paysanne, Food Secure Canada and movements for Indigenous food sovereignty. This analysis highlights both the challenges to conceptualizing food sovereignty and the tensions in defining inclusive policies that engage with food sovereignty at distinct, and often overlapping, scales. We critically assess how the ‘unity in diversity’ principle of food sovereignty functions in the Canadian context, paying particular attention to the policy implications of debates about the meaning of food sovereignty. What is most evident in examining the demands of a wide range of actors using food sovereignty language in Canada is a shared aim to reclaim a public voice in shaping the food system and a growing convergence around ideals of social justice, environmental sustainability and diversity. But, if food sovereignty is about fundamental transformation of the food system, it is yet in initial stages in this country.

The Myth of the North American City Revisited: A Comparative Conceptual and Empirical Evaluation

In The Myth of the North American City: Continentalism Challenged, Michael A. Goldberg and John Mercer articulate a largely “cultural deterministic” theory of urban development. Cities are shaped, they say, by their society’s cultural framework and “national character.” Given that American and Canadian cultures differ, their cities’ physical forms and governance differ too. Hence, there is no North American city. Using data from opinion surveys conducted in 2010 in Canada and the United States, among other data, we critique the North American City concept and test attitudinal hypotheses consistent with Goldberg and Mercer’s expectations. We concur that the concept of the North American city has little utility but also find little empirical support for most of the authors’ theses. All empirical attitudinal relationships, moreover, are mitigated significantly by factors of language in Canada and race in the United States.

Learning from authoritarian teachers: Controlling the situation or controlling yourself can sustain motivation

Positive psychology encompasses the study of positive outcomes, optimal functioning, and resilience in difficult circumstances. In the context of language learning, positive outcomes include academic engagement, self-determined motivation, persistence in language learning, and eventually becoming a proficient user of the language. These questionnaire studies extend previous research by addressing how these positive outcomes can be achieved even in adverse circumstances. In Study 1, the primary and secondary control scales of interest were validated using 2468 students at a Canadian university. Study 2 examined the capacity of 100 Canadian language learners to adjust themselves to fit in with their environment, termed secondary control, and how it was related to their motivation for and engagement in language learning and their feelings of anxiety speaking in the classroom. Secondary control in the form of adjusting one’s attitude towards language learning challenges through positive reappraisals was positively associated with self-determined motivation, need satisfaction, and engagement. analyses, positive reappraisals were also found to buffer the negative effects of having a controlling instructor on students’ engagement and anxiety. These findings suggest that personal characteristics interact with the learning environment to allow students to function optimally in their language courses even when the teacher is controlling.