Past Event

Indigenous language education in Canada: The challenge of revitalization from a second language acquisition perspective 

Mela Sarkar
(McGill University)

An overview of the language situation of Canada’s Indigenous peoples and their educational struggles will be used to situate contemporary Indigenous policies, programs and pedagogical strategies around language education. The backdrop for this discussion is the ongoing Indigenous struggle for self-determination and increasing mainstream awareness of Indigenous language and education issues. Most of Canada’s Indigenous languages are endangered, making the second language acquisition perspective particularly relevant for the revitalization and long-term survival of these languages. Drawing on work with a language revitalization project in a Mi’gmaq community in the Maritimes, some Indigenous responses to the challenge of creating new speakers through second language education will be demonstrated and future directions explored.

About the Presenter

Mela Sarkar teaches and researches second language and sociolinguistics issues at McGill University. Originally from Toronto, she has roots in Canada’s Bengali and Ukrainian communities. A native English-speaker who integrated into French-speaking Quebec, her research focus is the linguistic empowerment of marginalized minority-language speakers within majority societies. For several years she headed a team at McGill conducting research into the mixed language of Montreal Hip-Hop lyrics. Since 2007 she has been working with language teachers at Listuguj First Nation, Quebec, to develop appropriate second language pedagogy for the community’s Mi’gmaq revitalization initiative. Sarkar’s publications have appeared in several edited volumes and proceedings as well as in the Annual Review of Language Acquisition, the Canadian Modern Language Review, Diversité Urbaine, the International Journal of Multilingualism, the Journal of Language, Identity and Education, the Journal of Sociolinguistics and Kinéphanos.