Thursday, January 30, 2014

Language repertoire of a teacher training class in Vancouver

A list of what languages were represented in our classroom. The question was simply "which languages do you have in your repertoire?" The question of what constitutes a repertoire came up. I defined it as "whether you feel the language is a part of your life in some way."

One member of the class was absent when we did this and she would've added some more, so the totals would have been:

English - 17
Mandarin - 7
Cantonese - 4
French - 4
Korean - 3
Japanese  - 2
Spanish - 2
Indonesian - 1
Punjabi - 1
Hindi - 1
Latin - 1

So, some questions.

Is there anything surprising about this?

How does this list affirm (or not affirm) beliefs about what languages are important/common in Vancouver, or BC, or Canada, or North America?

How many of these are "native" vs "non-native" languages? Does that matter?

What would happen if we conducted class in a language other than English?

What language families or regions of the world are not represented? Why?

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