Walk Into Any Québec English-Language Classroom and You’ll Find an Untapped Strength
Every teacher in Québec’s English-language schools knows the feeling. You look out at your class and see students who speak French at home, English with their friends, Tagalog with their grandparents, and Arabic at their community centre. It can feel overwhelming — like you’re supposed to somehow manage all of that before you even get to the lesson. But what if those languages aren’t something to manage? What if they’re actually your greatest teaching tool?
That’s the argument Erin Quirk, a linguist and researcher at the University of Sherbrooke, has been building through her work on how children grow up with multiple languages. Her message for teachers is straightforward: the languages your students bring through the door are not gaps to fill. They are strengths to build on. Before children even arrive at school, their home and community environments are already shaping how they develop language. Quirk’s research, which drew on Statistics Canada data to track bilingualism across Québec communities, found that children who grow up in more bilingual environments have greater access to books in English and use the language more naturally in everyday life — even when their parents aren’t highly proficient in English themselves. The community is already doing some of the heavy lifting. School is where it gets to go further.
And when plurilingual students walk into your classroom, they walk in with real cognitive advantages. They can spot that “communication” in English and “communication” in French mean the same thing. They can use what they know in one language to unlock meaning in another. Researchers call this cross-linguistic transfer, and it works. A student who already knows the word “famille” in French doesn’t need to be taught “family” from scratch in English — they need a teacher who helps them make that connection explicit. That moment of recognition? That’s learning accelerating in real time.
There’s also the question of what happens when teachers invite all of a student’s languages into the room. Quirk’s community of practice — a network of researchers and teachers working together across the region — has found that students don’t disengage from English when their other languages are welcomed. They lean in more. Picture a Grade 4 classroom where the teacher asks students to find words in their home language that sound like the English word on the board. The room comes alive. Students who rarely speak up are suddenly the experts. That’s not a distraction from English literacy. That’s English literacy, built on a foundation students already have.
Practical resources already exist to support this approach. Élodil, a network developed at Université de Montréal, offers free classroom-ready activities that introduce language awareness across multiple languages — no special training required, and no expectation that teachers speak every language their students know.
The relational piece matters too. A 2023 study by Quirk and colleagues surveying 821 Québec-based parents raising multilingual children found that parents aren’t indifferent to their children’s language development — they’re invested and, in many cases, anxious about it. They want their children to succeed in English and French. They want to understand what’s happening at school. Inviting those parents in — asking a grandmother to share a few words in Haitian Creole, having a father explain how his language counts numbers differently — doesn’t take time away from curriculum. It tells every student in the room that who they are belongs here.
For English-language schools serving Québec’s anglophone minority community, that message carries extra weight. These are communities that know firsthand what it means to hold onto a language in a place where it isn’t always the loudest voice in the room. That lived experience is a bridge — from research to classroom, from school to family, from one language to many.
The languages are already in the room. The research tells us it’s time to use them.
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References
Cohen, C., & Quirk, E. (2025). The role of environmental factors on grammatical development in French–English bilinguals attending a dual language programme in France. Languages, 10(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10010006
Quirk, E., Brouillard, M., & Byers-Heinlein, K. (2024). Reading in two languages: Parents’ strategy and language use across book formats during bilingual shared reading. Bilingual Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2024.2305918
Quirk, E., Hadeed, N., & Byers-Heinlein, K. (2024). Trilingual families’ language strategies: Potential predictors and effect on trilingual exposure. International Journal of Multilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2024.2302100
Quirk, E., Brouillard, M., Ahooja, A., Ballinger, S., Polka, L., Byers-Heinlein, K., & Kircher, R. (2023). Quebec-based parents’ concerns regarding their children’s multilingual development. International Journal of Multilingualism, 21(3), 1476–1493. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2023.2184475
