Abstract Book of the 9th International Conference on Advanced Research in Education
Year: 2025
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Exploring Language Teachers’ Plurilingual Repertoires: A Lever for Transforming Beliefs and Practices
Diane Querrien
ABSTRACT:
Quebec is the only province in Canada where French holds sole official-language status. Yet Montréal is among the most linguistically diverse cities in North America, with over 170 languages reported (Statistics Canada, 2022). Though the plurilingual approaches have reshaped Second Language research (Kubota, 2020), their application in French teacher education remains partial and inconsistent (Peix, 2023). French as a Second Language teachers often feel underprepared for multilingual classrooms, conditioned by persistent monolingual ideologies (Maatouk & Payant, 2022) and limited practice-oriented training models (Dault, 2025). Teacher cognition research offers a crucial pathway to address this challenge: meaningful pedagogical change depends on engaging with teachers’ underlying beliefs (Borg, 2006). To better understand how plurilingual beliefs can evolve and translate into action, this design-based study examined pre-service French teachers enrolled in a Graduate Certificate (n = 14). Data included: (1) belief changes observed during training via the Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competence (PCC) Questionnaire (Galante, 2020); and (2) pedagogical reinvestment in course plans, practicum observations, and interviews. Findings highlight a paradox: although participants initially demonstrated high PCC levels, they did not identify as plurilingual. Activities fostering collective reflection and experiential immersion were decisive in shifting beliefs, supporting the argument that transforming cognition is key to transforming practice. Based on these insights, we propose four recommendations: (1) embed structured opportunities for critical reflection on teachers’ own plurilingual repertoires; (2) integrate concrete plurilingual tasks throughout coursework; (3) cultivate environments that normalise multilingualism; and (4) strengthen alignment between theoretical input, practicum experiences, and local linguistic realities.
Keywords: French as a Second Language (FSL); Inclusion; Multilingual Classrooms; Quebec; Teacher Education