‘Being bilingual will open doors for them’: Ideologies informing French immersion educators’ perspectives on bilingualism

Abstract

Purpose: New Brunswick, Canada, established its English-French Official Languages Act (OLA) in 1969 to promote linguistic equality for historically minoritized Francophones, premised on a language-as-right ideology. The OLA has been presented to Anglophones, however, as creating access to English-French bilingualism for various kinds of capital through a neoliberal language-as-resource ideology. In this context of conflicting ideologies, we wondered about the perspective of French immersion (FI) educators – the interface between policy and practice – regarding the purposes of bilingualism. We frame our question within Bakhtin’s notion of ideological becoming, asking: As potential mediators of their students’ ideological becoming, what are the perspectives of FI teachers and principals regarding the purposes of bilingualism? Design/data: We examine nine principals’ and 17 FI teachers’ discourse in semi-structured interviews conducted in New Brunswick. Data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory procedures, and further categorized according to Bourdieu’s constructs of capital. Findings: Our analysis indicates the dialogic nature of ideological becoming. On the one hand, authoritative neoliberal ideologies dominate the educators’ discourse regarding the purposes of bilingualism for their students. There was little attention to a socially-situated view of bilingualism enacted in a variety of communities of practice. On the other hand, we also note evidence of resistance against and distancing from this dominant ideology in educators’ own ideological becoming regarding bilingualism’s purposes for themselves. Originality: Bakhtin’s theory of ideological becoming provides a way to consider the entangled workings of ideology within language education for both educators and students. Implications: We thus propose professional development for educators to understand their own ideological becoming and develop students’ ideological becoming and their identities as bi/multilingual speakers.