Dr. Angelica Galante

Faculty of Education, Plurilingual Lab

McGill University

Dr. Angelica Galante is an Assistant Professor in Language Education in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Her research examines language pedagogy in multilingual settings, social factors in language development, and plurilingual and pluricultural competence. Dr. Galante is the Founder and Director of the Plurilingual Lab, where she conducts studies and mobilizes research results and the Breaking the Invisible Wall website with available language tasks used in her previous research that can be adapted and applied in the language classroom. She is the recipient of the prestigious Pat Clifford Award for exceptional leadership in research on teacher professional development in plurilingual pedagogy. Her work can be found in journals such as Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Applied Linguistics Review.

Keynote Address

Plurilingualism as an Anti-Discriminatory Pedagogical Approach for Learner Empowerment

Recent research in language education and applied linguistics has repeatedly called for language pedagogy that responds to the needs of multilingual and multicultural societies, with a focus on social justice and anti-discrimination. One theoretical and pedagogical framework that has gained much attention is plurilingualism. In this presentation, I will explain what plurilingualism is, how it differs from other approaches (e.g., multilingual), and why it is important in language teaching and learning to overcome linguistic, cultural and racial discrimination. I will later present results of empirical studies conducted in English, French, and Spanish language classes to show how contextualized plurilingual pedagogy can empower learners. Results of these studies reveal that plurilingual pedagogy supported diversity of thinking and enhanced learner’s cognition, criticality, empathy, and language learning, among other factors. Teachers in these studies unanimously showed preference for plurilingual pedagogy compared to other approaches as it encouraged deep reflection of their own teaching, shifting their mindsets to embrace decoloniality and learner inclusion. Results also show that plurilingual pedagogy facilitated language development, allowing learners to take pride in their diverse identities and see themselves as empowered agents who flexibly use their repertoire depending on purpose, interlocutors, context, and emotional state. Finally, I argue that collectively language teachers can take small impactful steps in their classrooms to bring about social change for more inclusive societies.