Research Project

Our Language Rights

Francophones in Ontario are both an official language minority community and a very diverse group, with a large proportion of speakers in recent years hailing from the African diaspora. French learners (through French immersion) are also increasing at a quick pace.  This research project seeks to understand the connections between reading, identity, and community engagement for young Francophones and French-learning youth in Ontario and uses this understanding to help bilingual (or multilingual) youth reimagine and suggest improvements for public library service. For this project, we interpret reading as engagement with stories (in a variety of formats), not engagement with published texts alone (Dali & Hohmann, 2022). Reading for pleasure in one’s heritage language is critical for general well-being and mental health, and libraries are well positioned to support and assist the development of vibrant language communities in minority contexts. We study the reading practices of the youth using co-design and participatory methods to provide an opportunity for them to self-reflect and use their reading identities as a starting point for exploring the mechanisms that contribute to belongingness. While we focus on an official language community, we see this as a starting point for examining heritage language loss more generally, and study youth engagement with reading in other languages besides French.