Belonging and Legitimacy for French Language Teachers

Abstract

With the ongoing French as a second language (FSL) teacher shortage crisis driving multi-million-dollar expenditures from governments, professional associations, and school boards, little attention has turned towards identifying systemic issues, rooted in racial ideologies, which may be impacting FSL teachers' desire to stay (or even enter) into the profession. In this chapter, using visual narratives and arts-based research methods, the authors applied LangCrit and raciolingusitics to examine future FSL teachers' discourses about French as a language/culture and learning French and teaching French. The data collected over a year, showcasing three participants, reveal the vastly different positionalities entrenched in complex interactions with language standard ideologies, native-speakerism, colonialism and racism. The authors ask, then, how stakeholders and teacher education programs might account for these differing lived realities when it comes to recruiting and preparing future FSL teachers for long-term success in the profession.