Each year, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) award prestigious scholarships to top-ranked candidates across the province and the country. We are very pleased to announce that three graduate students from McGill's Language Education program have won this year's major scholarships:
John Wayne N. dela Cruz has won a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. His PhD research, supervised by Dr. Angelica Galante, is titled From Assimilation to Integration: Legitimizing Immigrant L2 Learners’ Plurilingualism in Canadian L2 Education. The study investigates how existing official monolingual and bilingual policies in Canada validate or disparage the plurilingual and pluricultural practices and identities of recent Filipino immigrants to Canada learning English and/or French as a second language (L2) in the officially monolingual cities of Edmonton and Montréal. John will examine the lived experiences and centre the voices of newcomer Filipino L2 learners in their new environments as a way to engage existing educational and societal policies in Canada into shifting its monolingual and monocultural postures towards a more inclusive plurilingual and pluricultural stance. He hopes to leverage this research to help inform a linguistically and culturally responsive Canadian L2 education that legitimizes the rich linguistic repertoires, diverse language practices, and complex identities of multilingual learners in their language classrooms.
April Passi has won an FRQSC Doctoral Scholarship. Her PhD research, supervised by Dr. Mela Sarkar and Dr. Sunny M. C. Lau, is titled Empowering Multilingual Students Through Translingual Personal Narrative Writing. The study aims to develop, analyze, and share a translanguaging pedagogy model grounded in the urban Canadian context. April is exploring student experiences with this pedagogical model in relation to translingual identity development and awareness of race/language hierarchies. Specifically, she will examine a translingual personal narrative writing (PNW) unit in a college-level English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom in Montréal, Québec.
Ben Calman has won the SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master’s level. His MA research, co-supervised by Dr. Angelica Galante and Dr. Mela Sarkar, is titled Linguistic Inclusion and Discrimination: The Experiences of Plurilingual International Students in a Canadian University. By investigating the experiences of plurilingual international students through the frameworks of raciolinguistic microaggressions and plurilingualism, Ben is exploring international students’ perspectives on linguistic discrimination and the converse phenomenon of linguistic inclusion in the context of a Canadian university. The findings will be the basis of recommendations for future strategies concerning equitable education in higher education.
Congratulations to this year's winners of these prestigious scholarships. We wish you success in your research journey!
