Second and Foreign Language Education in Canada
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SECOND AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN CANADA
INTRODUCTION
Canada, a vast country comprised of ten provinces and three territories, has a linguistically and culturally diverse population. Officially a bilingual country (English and French), in a recent consensus (Statistics Canada, 2001), 59% of the population reported English as their mother tongue, 23% French, and 18% a mother tongue other than English or French, about 1% of whom are aboriginal people. Constitutionally, education is the responsibility of the provinces and territories, and each one has distinct policies and curricula. There is some communication across jurisdictions, through structures such as the Council of Ministers of Education, but there is no direct federal government connection to education in schools. There is, however, a sharing of expenditure for some aspects of public education (health and other welfare programs) between the provinces and the federal government and this includes federal funding to support official minority language vitality and development (i.e., English or French in a provincial, or regional, context where one of the other official languages dominates). In view of such diverse sociopolitical and economic factors, second and foreign language education has developed variously across geopolitical contexts and language program types. The following identifies some of the more significant trends and initiatives that have been undertaken. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal peoples populated Canada. Since the sixteenth century, immigrants have been arriving from Northern and Western Europe, and increasingly from all over the world. European Canada was French until 1763, when it was ceded to Britain after the 7 Years War. Since the earliest days, struggles between Francophones and Anglophones for separate identities, including religious and linguistic rights, have been central threads throughout the country’s social and political history. Canada was created legally (Constitution Act, 1867) through the merger of four British Colonies. There was minimal constitutional provision N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 197–208. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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M A R G A R E T E A R LY
for language. Arguably, the concept of official languages as a symbol of Canadian identity came most forcibly to the fore from the 1960s to the present. In the 1960s, Francophones in Quebec took steps to gain more control, during a period of rapid social change known as the “quiet revolution.” As a response to a perceived crisis in national identity, in 1963, the federal government established, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism out of which resulted the Official Languages Act of 1969. This act gave French and English equal status as Canada’s official languages and created the position of Commissioner of Official Languages to oversee the implementation of the Act. In 1
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