“Using French words is not the same as speaking French”: A critical sociolinguistic ethnography of Quebec’s classes d’accueil

• In Event: Linguistic Hierachies and Multilingual Education

Proposal

In liberal democratic nation states, public education has long had two functions: 1) To create citizens, and 2) To facilitate access to social mobility through school success. However, schools have often found it difficult to accomplish the second goal, reproducing instead various forms of social difference and social inequality (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Heller, 2002). This problem is particularly acute in the schools of quasi-nation (language minority) states, such as Catalonia, the Basque Region, Switzerland, and Quebec, where citizenship is linked to the preservation of a language and culture, while these communities receive increasing numbers of immigrants from around the world. My work focuses on how these tensions are managed in Quebec, where newly arrived immigrants are legally obligated (under Bill 101 and 96) to send their children to French-language schools.

On the Island of Montreal as well as various other cities in the province, this tension is institutionally managed by the classes d’accueil model: French-medium ‘reception classes’ that operate parallel to mainstream classes in public schools. This model is supported by a belief that if newcomers to Quebec learn French, they can more easily succeed in school and integrate into Quebec society (Gouvernement du Québec, 2001). The objective of the classes d’accueil is often interpreted in the field as producing “accomplished francophones…who will perform like all the others” (pedagogical advisor participant) or “little Quebecers” (classe d’accueil teacher participant)

To this end, this research is guided by the following overarching questions: What roles do various institutions- including the school system as a regulatory state-sponsored institution, but also larger discursive formations and national culture(s)- play in the debates surrounding immigration in Canada and in Quebec today? More specifically, does the classe d’accueil provide a space for minority students to navigate their new worlds in ways that provide them access to school success as well as social relations they find meaningful and satisfying? What cultural and language practices do immigrant learners acquire and (re)appropriate in order to position themselves in their new environment?

Based on ethnographic fieldwork collected between 2014 and 2020, this paper examines the manner in which the Quebec school system attempts to transform school-aged newcomer students into Québécois citizens, in relation how the students position themselves in the face of these institutional attempts. While this is based on the premise that these strategies will facilitate their "integration" into Quebec society, my results demonstrate that the former students I interviewed, all of whom have gone through the classes d’accueil system, do not understand themselves as such. Despite having lived in Montreal for several years and sometimes for decades, they consider that they are not perceived as "real Quebecers" by traditional speakers of Québécois French who categorize them as "other, immigrant, foreign, inauthentic" based on their "accent", "language practices" (their performances of bilingualism or plurilingualism), and "choices of words" as semiotic resources of categorization, in relation to other non-linguistic elements, such as "skin colour" and "cultural practices". And yet, these “new speakers” (O’Rourke, Pujolar & Ramallo, 2015) deploy their linguistic resources such that they succeed in making a life in the metropolis of Montreal, where mobility, globalization and multilingualism seem to make modes of ethnonational categorization increasingly less relevant. This paper will shed light on the manner in which processes of constructing legitimization and authentication determine who has the right to decide who can be considered a real “francophone” or “Québécois”.

Author

• Gabrielle Breton-Carbonneau, OISE, University of Toronto, (Toronto, ON, CA) [124487]