Reflections on childhood bilingualism and multilingualism

Within the framework of this forum, we will present an overview of our recent research projects at OLBI and share the results of three projects on children bilingualism and multilingualism. I begin with a case study of a young bilingual child who undergoes shifts between active and passive bilingualism, illustrating psycholinguistic and socialization aspects of language attrition and reactivation/relearning phenomena in minority-majority language contexts. I then continue with a mixed-methods study (questionnaires and follow-up interviews) of households with bilingual and multilingual children, focusing on family language policy and school language choice as two interconnected variables with a differential impact on the number of languages a child understands and speaks. We will conclude with a discussion of the importance and the impact of the terms “mother tongue”, “first language” and “native language” within the context of Canadian bilingualism and of a globalised world, within which plurilingual and translingual practices and values are increasingly recognized and encouraged. This serves as a backdrop for a study of language background profiling of incoming students at elementary schools across several Canadian provinces.