In Canada, valuing diversity is supported by policies of multiculturalism or intercultural education. However, linguistic diversity has not, heretofore, been systematically examined in school programs. Drawing on research on multilingual education and recent developments in critical pedagogies, we conducted a case study of the implementation of Language Awareness activities in elementary schools of Vancouver and Montreal. Based on a teacher researcher collaboration, we observed and filmed classroom Language Awareness activities, interviewed students and gathered documents that provided contextual information. The data excerpts examined in this article illustrate how students who were exposed to languages that were unknown by the majority, or to words borrowed from other languages, collaborated to draw on their collective language resources and co-construct new knowledge about language diversity.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.