MonISLA
Montreal Institute for Second Language Acquisition
Activities
First meeting of the year
Friday, October 6 at 10:30 a.m. at UQAM, in room N-4860 of the Paul-Gérin-Lajoie pavilion (1205, rue Saint-Denis).
One of the main objectives of MonISLA is to be a place for meeting and exchange leading to a possible collaborative project. For this meeting, we will talk about project ideas and the role and contributions that everyone could make.
The school, a key factor, but not sufficient for the recovery of the Basque language
Thursday September 21, 2023 - McGill Faculty of Education (3700 McTavish Street - Education Building - Room 233)
This presentation will first give an overview of the school system in the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain and the sociolinguistic situation of Basque in the early 80s, when bilingual (Basque-Spanish) school models were first introduced. The presentation will focus on the evolution of these school language models, which vary according to the amount of time devoted to Spanish or Basque as the language of instruction. Parents ultimately choose the school language model for their children, and the model favoring instruction in Basque has prevailed over time, with 66.3% of pupils enrolled in this model. Thanks largely to the support of schools, Basque is now spoken by 250,000 more people than in 1991, and almost 75% of the Basque Country's population aged 16 to 24 is bilingual. However, Spanish is the mother tongue of 60% of this age group, and over 50% of them have a better command of Spanish than Basque. In other words, school is a key, but not sufficient, factor in guaranteeing the acquisition and use of Basque in society. The use of the language in the family, the sociolinguistics of the region in which we live and the language of extracurricular activities are essential to achieving a good command of Basque.
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