Plurilingual Pedagogies: Discipline-Specific Teaching Strategies for Linguistically Diverse Students

In 2025, Champlain College-Lennoxville was involved in a research-creation project on plurilingual pedagogies in collaboration with Bishop’s University and funded by the Entente Canada-Québec (ECQ). As many CEGEP students use 2, 3, or more languages for study, work, and their personal lives, the project aimed to help teachers across diverse disciplines adapt teaching strategies to promote student success in their programs while encouraging the development of students’ French and English language skills.

As part of the project, pedagogical counsellors collaborated with teachers from 8 different programs who contributed to an Inventory of Plurilingual Strategies, a collection of open-source tools available to other teachers in the network to adapt for their own use. Video capsules also document the experiences of teachers implementing these new strategies.

The challenge of multilingual teaching: The situation at Champlain and common in other CEGEPs

At Champlain-Lennoxville, the only English-language CEGEP in the Eastern Townships, student surveys indicate that:

• 65-70% of students speak French as a 1^st language
• 30-35% of students speak English as a 1^st language
• 2-3% speak both English and French as 2^nd and 3^rd languages
• 80% consider themselves bilingual
• 17% consider themselves plurilingual
• only 3% consider themselves monolingual

Nearly all students are therefore using 2 or 3 languages on a daily basis. While exact statistics on faculty are not available, the language demographics of faculty appear to resemble those of the student population.

Champlain-Lennoxville’s plurilingual community has always made studies at Champlain a challenging and enriching educational option for students; and correspondingly, teachers have always had the challenge of working with a linguistically diverse student body and preparing students for studies, work, and life in a bilingual or plurilingual context.

The project: Plurilingual Pedagogies

In 2025, pedagogical counsellors, along with 8 program teachers, collaborated with Bishop’s University researcher Sunny Lau on an ECQ research-creation project on Plurilingual Pedagogies. Project participants included teachers from 8 different disciplines:

• Special Education Techniques (SET)
• Computer Science Technology (CST)
• Visual Arts
• Nursing
• Accounting and Management Technology (AMT)
• Music
• Geography and Globalization
• Mathematics

Phase 1

In the winter of 2025, under the guidance of Professor Lau, teachers and pedagogical counsellors met regularly to learn about plurilingual teaching approaches, and to think about how they could respond to the needs of teachers and students at the College. Researchers in plurilingualism and education from the University of Toronto and Queen’s University also came to offer workshops to the teachers. In parallel, focus groups and student surveys were used to create a “linguistic portrait” of Champlain’s student body and to get a sense of students’ learning needs with respect to language.

Phase 2

In the fall of 2025, teachers developed and deployed their own plurilingual teaching strategies. Teachers’ classes were observed by Sunny Lau, who helped them refine their strategies during one-on-one sessions. Finally, teachers met together to share their experience and collectively consider ways to improve the strategies and integrate them more broadly within their programs. Additional student focus groups and interviews with teachers were used to collect feedback on how effective the plurilingual teaching strategies were from a student perspective.

Teachers, pedagogical counsellors, and researchers during a meeting at Champlain (Photo credit: Vincent Lafrance)

Project outcomes

Lesson plans and plurilingual teaching strategies developed by the participating teachers were compiled into an open-source resource bank that can be accessed and adapted by teachers across the college network. In addition, video capsules are available featuring interviews with the 8 teachers in which they explain the plurilingual strategies that they developed, how the strategies unfolded in the classroom, and the results they observed.

Video capsule featuring an interview with Vincent Grimard, a geography teacher, discussing a glossary activity designed as a plurilingual strategy in his Globalization course

What is plurilingual pedagogy?

Rather than a well-defined theory, plurilingual pedagogy refers to a family of pedagogical attitudes with respect to the role that languages play in learning, and how learners develop new language skills.

To begin with, the term plurilingualism is used to avoid reductive linguistic identities and instead considers the many contexts or the many ways in which one might have some knowledge of a language. For example, being a “French speaker” might mean speaking French as a mother tongue, passing a certain ministerial or official exam, being able to effectively work in a francophone context, or being able to function in francophone social contexts. It is possible to understand a language but be unable to speak it, or to read and write in a language without speaking it well. One might have a regional or foreign accent, which, in some contexts, may be used to judge the relative fluency of a speaker according to some formal or informal criteria. Instead of designating people simply as either speakers or non-speakers of a language, proponents of plurilingualism try to make use of more detailed, specific descriptions of linguistic abilities.

Secondly, plurilingualism tends to focus on linguistic abilities rather than deficiencies. While a student is practising a target language (learning French or English, for example), they may bring with them a wealth of linguistic abilities in the form of knowledge of their mother tongue and other languages. For example, they might have conscious or unconscious knowledge of Greek and Latin roots through reference to their 1^st language, which can help them learn vocabulary more quickly in the target language. Knowledge of syntax in one language can also help the student develop an understanding of a target language, either by reference to the similarities or differences between the languages. Plurilingual pedagogies focus on this knowledge in the learning of new languages.

Thirdly, rather than encouraging full immersion, plurilingualism promotes building cognitive bridges between languages. While traditional wisdom often suggests that immersion is the fastest way to assimilate a new language, plurilingualism suggests that this can prevent students from drawing on existing linguistic resources when learning a new language.

Finally, plurilingualism tends to consider the importance of the cultural aspect of languages, linguistic meaning, and language acquisition. Affirming linguistic resources (instead of focusing on linguistic deficiencies) and allowing students to bring knowledge of their own languages into the learning space can encourage students to share aspects of their own language and culture with their classmates and learning groups. Promoting this participative learning space can, in turn, help students remain actively engaged; inspire them to participate in discussions, dialogue, and dialectical learning strategies; and in turn, promote faster learning of the target language.

Concrete, discipline-specific strategies developed within the project

As the 8 participating teachers came from different programs, the strategies developed were similarly diverse.

Many of the teachers involved in the project are now working to expand these approaches within their own practices or to integrate them more broadly within their program to ensure that students approach their studies from a plurilingual perspective earlier in their studies.

Conclusion

The plurilingualism project has been beneficial in contributing to the College’s mission and values. Early findings – from student focus groups and interviews with participating teachers – suggest that the use of plurilingual strategies has resulted in increased student engagement, helped better prepare students for a bilingual workplace and social life, supported the development and acquisition of discipline-specific competencies, and increased students’ confidence in practising the language or languages they are learning.

Teachers are invited to consult the available open-source resources and adapt them to their own teaching contexts.