Reading plurilingual texts: children’s critical engagement with unfamiliar languages and eco-social issues

This paper elaborates on some initial findings from a plurilingual comprehension task that a Grade 6 class in Quebec, Canada, completed without teacher guidance, as a baseline tool to illuminate their existing language awareness and reading abilities for critical understanding. Drawing on previous research on plurilingualism and critical literacy, this study is part of a broader research project that brings together teachers of French and English, as first or second language, to build linguistic and curricular bridges across the two official languages for in-depth learning about eco-social issues. We use the concept of critical moments as our method to capture and analyse key instances of great research significance, i.e., when students actively made sense of their wonderings about unknown language elements and story development. The findings illuminate students’ promising abilities to operate across language boundaries, interpret and compare new language structures, transfer reading strategies (both linguistic and visual), and exercise critical judgement on issues addressed in the text. Implications for teaching and further research are discussed.