'But do monolingual people really exist?' Analysing elementary students' contrasting representations of plurilingualism through sequential reflexive drawing

摘要

This article draws on data generated through a multi-site collaborative inquiry with students across five English and French schools in Canada and France to investigate children's social representations of plurilingualism. Children were asked to draw a sequence of reflexive drawings of a monolingual, a bilingual and a plurilingual individual, as well as themselves. Drawing on theories of social representations of language and plurilingualism, the focus herein is on analysing children's language representations made visible through the medium of drawing. The article concludes with a discussion of the affordances of using creative multimodal methods in applied linguistics research.