This study addresses a concern for the experience of participants in Canadian Government sponsored language and job-training programs for recent immigrants, specifically El Salvadoran refugees. The research has sought to uncover, through interviews with two former students, some of their impressions and insights concerning their participation in a Canadian government sponsored language and job-training program. The interviews were structured to account for historical, cultural, political, ideological and educational events and influences in El Salvador and Canada that contributed to the formation of their subjective experience within the context of the Canadian programs in which they participated. Analysis of the interview transcripts and notes made during and after the interviews revealed several emergent themes. These were: political activity and war, teachers as leaders, religion, what is good teaching, adjustment to Canada, values and hopes, and the need for ESL and job-training programs. In the views of the two informants, the teacher-student relationship, based on awareness, communication and respect emerged as a very important feature of successful pedagogy . The findings are related and discussed in relation to Canadian society. The instructional implications are discussed with reference to relevant pedagogical approaches.

This study addresses a concern for the experience of participants in Canadian Government sponsored language and job-training programs for recent immigrants, specifically El Salvadoran refugees. The research has sought to uncover, through interviews with two former students, some of their impressions and insights concerning their participation in a Canadian government sponsored language and job-training program. The interviews were structured to account for historical, cultural, political, ideological and educational events and influences in El Salvador and Canada that contributed to the formation of their subjective experience within the context of the Canadian programs in which they participated. Analysis of the interview transcripts and notes made during and after the interviews revealed several emergent themes. These were: political activity and war, teachers as leaders, religion, what is good teaching, adjustment to Canada, values and hopes, and the need for ESL and job-training programs. In the views of the two informants, the teacher-student relationship, based on awareness, communication and respect emerged as a very important feature of successful pedagogy . The findings are related and discussed in relation to Canadian society. The instructional implications are discussed with reference to relevant pedagogical approaches. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

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Histories give little attention to language dominance in school and community -- to the fact that the past one-hundred years of "One People, One Language, One School" attitudes, policies, and goals in Anglo-American schools and communities have brought with them the demise of Native-American languages, the disappearance of linguistic differences due to immigrant origin, the disvalue or stereotype of linguistic patterns derived from regional and ethnic variation, and the insistence on English as a mark of linguistic and intellectual virtue. Telling Stories (0ut of School) of Mother Tongue, God's Tongue, and the Queen's Tongue: An Ethnography in Canada gives attention to one such history. Told in Mennonite perspective and framed in Manitoba schools between 1890 and 1990, Telling Stories (Out of School) begins with tales of English-speaking Canadian insistence on and German-speaking Mennonite resistance to English-only language education policies in public and private schools serving a Mennonite speech community in southern Manitoba. The research problem links itself historically to a series of language education acts passed by the Manitoba Legislature, adjudicated by the Manitoba Attorney General, the Canadian Supreme Court, and the British Privy Council, and enforced by the Manitoba Department of Education -- all between 1890 and 1920. These English-only policies, deemed an expedient response to the question of how to unify English Canadians, French-Canadians, Aboriginals, and immigrants, abrogated the language education rights of all linguistic minorities. English prevailed in Manitoba schools until the 1960s. After the mid-1960s, though, the Canadian Parliament in concert with the Manitoba Legislature, the Manitoba Department of Education, and local public school districts re-affirmed Canada's English-French legacy as well as its multilingual, multicultural heritage with yet another series of language and language education acts -- the Canadian Official Languages Act of 1969, the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, and the Canadian Multicultural Act of 1988. Today, the Canadian "Cultural Mosaic," or "Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework," dispels the "Melting Pot" myth borrowed from the United States at the turn of the century. And, the 1990 right to "language education choice" in Manitoba's system of public schools denies the 1890 rule of "One People, One Language, One School." To trace historical and recent developments in a Mennonite speech community associated with these policies, and subsequently with the contact of English, High German, and Low German” outside the classroom," the ethnographer -- an insider-outsider -- synthesizes the Hymes-type work in ethnographies of speaking and the Milroy-type work in language and social networks to examine the Ferguson-coined phenomenon of diglossia and the Fishman-extended relationship between societal diglossia and individual Bilingualism. Interviews with fifty-seven speakers, treated as a sequence of ethno-acts and ethno-events, are guided by the general question of sociolinguistic research -- who uses what language with whom, when, where, and why? Using Hymes mnemonic code of SPEAKING leads to the description of a shared history and a shared way of speaking as well as to insights into linguistic continuity, change, and compartmentalization. Telling Stories (Out of School) ends; with tales of an ethnic revival in Mennonite schools and community today -- with new voices speaking Low German High German, and English. While the present ethnography of a Mennonite speech community in Canada, framed in Manitoba schools between 1890 and 1990, should be regarded as impressionistic and preliminary, the fact remains -- language dominance does do something to the life of language in a community as does language education policy that attempts to "start where the child is ... linguisticallly."

The doctoral thesis investigates the impact of legal mobilization and judicial decisions on official minority-language education (OMLE) policy outside Quebec using a model of judicial impact derived from New Institutionalism theory. The New Institutionalism (NI) model of judicial impact synthesizes the dominant approaches to judicial impact found in the US literature, which are reviewed in Chapter Two, and transcends them by placing them within a framework based on the New Institutionalism. / The model, as developed in Chapter Three, proposes that certain factors will increase the probability of judicial decisions having a positive influence on policy, such as whether incentives are provided for implementation. The model argues that institutions---as structures and state actors---have important influences on these factors. Furthermore, the NI model recognizes that institutions play a partial and contingent role in the construction of policy preferences and discourse and in mediating the political process more generally over time. / Chapter Four demonstrates that the NI model can be applied usefully to reinterpret existing accounts of how legal mobilization and judicial decisions impacted the struggle over school desegregation in the US---a case that provides a heuristic comparison to OMLE policy as it concerns the question of how and where minorities are educated. / Chapters Five through Seven describe OMLE policy development in Canada from the latter 1970s until 2000, with case studies of Alberta and, to a lesser extent, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Chapter Eight reveals that legal mobilization by Francophone groups cannot be understood without reference to institutional factors, particularly the Charter of Rights and funding from the federal government. The policy impact of legal mobilization was influenced strongly by the Supreme Court's 1990 Mahe decision and by federal government funding to the provinces for OMLE policy development, while public opinion appeared to be a least a moderately constraining force on policy change. Chapter Eight further reveals that legal mobilization and judicial decisions helped Francophone groups gain access to the policy process and shaped the policy goals and discourse of actors within the process over time. / Chapter Nine bolsters confidence in the conclusions generated in Chapter Eight by demonstrating how the explanations provided by the NI model, which emphasize the direct or mediating influence of institutional factors, are superior to explanations generated by a Critical Legal Studies (CLS) approach, a "systems" approach, a "dispute-centered" approach, and by Gerald Rosenberg's model. The thesis concludes by suggesting avenues for future research on judicial impact, particularly research that is focused on comparative institutionalism.

The official language policies and their basic concepts, the principle of personality in Canada and the principle of territoriality in Switzerland, are critically analyzed. The two democratic federations are compared as two multination states since 'nation' is defined in cultural terms. Language survival is justified in liberal theory through minority rights. The principle of territoriality that assures the dominance of the linguistic majority over a territory within the federation is in accordance with liberal democracy if fundamental rights are protected. The principle of territoriality contributes thus to political stability within a multination federation. There is no movement in Switzerland that is fed by a language-based grievance despite the existence of three linguistic minorities: Switzerland accommodates successfully linguistic diversity. In Canada, the perception that the survival of the French language might not be sustained fuels a secessionist movement threatening the unity of the federation.

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Language has become a central feature of the debate surrounding Canadian identity. The Canadian project is an example of a state struggling to find a means of accommodating linguistic difference. This struggle is epitomized by the language legislation in Quebec as well as by federal bilingualism. Language legislation is ultimately aimed at promoting and protecting identity. An examination of language legislation as promoted by Quebec and the federal government reveals a different orientation toward the concept of equality. Language policy thus presents both a vision of community and a political argument. Federal language policy promotes a vision of Canada in which English and French are juridically equal. Politically, this vision of community denies Quebec is distinct. Quebec's language policy, on the other hand, asserts the importance of protecting Quebecois culture against the majoritarian impulses of a larger Canadian identity. As a result, Quebec's language legislation incorporates Quebec's different position in Canada into a definition of equality. Recognition that Quebec has a right to protect its language is tantamount to an acknowledgement that Quebec is a distinct society in Canada. The language debate thus embodies competing visions of equality that relate to a specific identity. The national unity issue plaguing Canada cannot be resolved through a commitment to equality as similar treatment. The problem of language planning, in Canada, revolves around finding a way to acknowledge and promote the local aspirations of the Quebecois, without creating an inequitable language environment for the English linguistic minority in Quebec.