McGill’s Plurilingual Lab resumed its Grad Talks series on Jan. 15 as part of an initiative to highlight graduate students’ research on language education while also allowing them to receive constructive feedback from other researchers. The first talk of the year was led by Tiffany Tam, a University of Toronto master’s student who studies how teacher identity and multilingualism intersect in Ontario’s K-12 classrooms. 

Tam focused her talk on how teacher candidates (TCs) shape their professional identities based on their multilingual and racial backgrounds, and how these choices influence their teaching. She developed her framework regarding TC experience based on multiple case studies from schools in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) using raciolinguistics, which examines how race and language are intertwined.

In her research, Tam determined that current GTA classrooms often push English as the sole language for K-12 education. She noted that this is especially true for TCs, who often receive education in environments where learning in multiple languages is discouraged. As such, many TCs compartmentalize their multilingual identities rather than treating them as a valuable resource.

“Language patterns can be very different,” Tam explained. “But what you have in your mind, in your written and spoken language, are valuable. They can help you speak English better because you already know one or two more languages already.”

Due to this compartmentalization, Tam argued that TCs lose their cultural identity. Her research found that some TCs divorce themselves from their previous identities to easily integrate with Canadian culture, as shown in one of the TC case studies. Tam described how the TC in question gradually lost their native language fluency as they acclimated to Canada, so they sought to introduce more languages into Teacher Education Programs (TEPs). This measure would help students understand the value of speaking multiple languages in diverse environments.

However, since many TCs believe that multilingual students’ English development falls under the responsibility of English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, success is often limited. Tam corroborated this example with another case study, explaining how an ESL student struggled to understand English concepts, like cars. The student only understood after a TC described cars in Arabic, saying sayaara hamraa, meaning a red car.

Tam’s research also highlighted the insufficient education about race and language within TEPs, stating that her research participants felt that discussions surrounding race were often surface-level in classroom settings. She discussed how racialized speakers are still seen as ‘deficient’ speakers, with a separation between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ English-speaking TCs. Tam explained how this “binarization of languages” serves to reinforce raciolinguistic stereotypes. This racialized perception often led to erroneous assumptions, as TCs with multilingual identities were presumed to be learning English as a second language.

Furthermore, Tam noted how TC practicum experiences differ across socioeconomic settings. In private schools, which often have a majority of white and Asian students, she emphasized how English is typically the only language heard in classrooms. In contrast, public schools often have classrooms where a myriad of languages can be heard. 

Tam explained this discrepancy as a result of students’ backgrounds: Public schools have more immigrant students who arrived in Canada with diverse language backgrounds. Despite the growing number of immigrant students, TEPs for public schools remain unchanging, hindering TCs’ teaching capabilities when it comes to educating ESL students. To improve this, Tam concludes that a multilingual framework celebrating language diversity can be adopted across schools.

“I believe that TEPs have to be up to date to meet the needs of these multilingual TCs and students in Ontario, as well as the changing climate of race, racialization, and language,” Tam said. “This has been an area that has always been taken for granted and pushed aside in education studies.”