I’m a (double) alumna of the UCL Institute of Education, and so receive regular alumni association newsletters full of interesting initiatives out of the Institute.

I was fascinated to learn about the UK’s National Consortium for Languages Education, a a government-funded consortium led by IOE together with the Goethe-Institut and the British Council.

The NCLE aims to inspire “societal change by fostering greater national interest for language learning and improving equity by enabling student’s access to high quality language education.” 

This is a great example of Ruiz’s (1984) language-as-resource orientation to language planning. Ruiz’s three orientations—language-as-problem, language-as-right, and language-as-resource—serve as a tool which can “[delimits] the ways we talk about language and language issues[;] they determine the basic questions we ask, the conclusions we draw from the data, and even the data themselves” (Ruiz, 1984, p. 16).

Focused on the secondary sector, the Consortium organizes events, (C)PD opportunities for teachers, and has set up a network of Language Hubs, which “[bring] together languages education professionals to help schools lead improvement in languages education in England“. Language Hubs have the goal of “[increasing] the number of pupils studying languages, improve the transition from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3, widen uptake of language learning for disadvantaged pupils and increase access to home, heritage, and community languages.”   

Hult and Hornberger (2016, p. 33), identify the defining characteristics, or “(pre)dispositions” toward language that characterize a language-as-resource orientation. The following (pre)dispositions are present throughout the descriptions of the NCLEs mission, goals, and initiatives:

• Societal multilingualism and cultural diversity are valued
• Languages are resources for everyone, not only for linguistic minorities and their communities
• Languages are both a personal and a national resource
• Languages have extrinsic value for purposes such as national security, diplomacy, military action, espionage, business, media, public relations, among other possibilities 
• Languages have intrinsic value for purposes such as cultural reproduction, community relations, identity construction, building self-esteem, intellectual engagement, civic participation, among other possibilities
• Awareness of different languages and cultures reduces ethnocentrism and xenophobia and enhances intercultural understanding 

This got me wondering about consortia or networks in Canada with aims that align with a language-as-resource orientation–who promote the study of languages. Of course our educational policy and linguistic landscape is different, and so would likely be provincially rather than nationally based. Canada’s two official languages, as well as indigenous languages as well as home/heritage/community languages would have to be accounted for.

One example is The Halifax Languages Consortium. They have the objective of “[identifying and developing] a number of collaborative outreach and policy initiatives that could assess and build the capacity for teaching and learning languages in Nova Scotia. We are seeking to promote the study of second languages, share best practices, and engage community stakeholders.”

According to their website, the Consortium has hosted events such as The Value of Languages in Nova Scotia Summit in 2016, a Languages and Cultures Business Forum in 2020, a NS Language Teachers’ PD Day in 2019, as well as an online Languages Cafe in 2021.

Hult and Hornberger (2016, p. 41) proposed a set of critical analytical questions which emerge from the language-as-resource orientation, including “What languages are represented as resources?” It’s worth noting that the list of 12 languages highlighted by the Halifax Language Consortium on their website does not include Mi’kmaw.

Are there other examples of language-as-resource in the wild? Of consortia or networks in Canada or elsewhere doing this kind of work?