Multilingualism in the museum: languages at the heart of the development of pluraliteracy and learning science

A study conducted in collaboration with museum institutions as educational sites in a highly multilingual and multicultural environment serves as a reflection to better understand how young multilingual speakers make sense of their languages and writing practices and mobilize multilingual resources to understand and learn in different situations. We present some reflections based on examples from a pilot study conducted with 5-year-old children who participated in science workshops at the museum. During these workshops, they were asked to document and illustrate what they learned about animals and their tracks, through drawing and photos (Molinié, 2009 and 2014) and the collaborative creation of a digital book using a touch pad (Sandvik, Smørdal and Østerud, 2009). This contribution is an opportunity to ask a few questions about the role of French in literacy development in an essentially English-speaking environment where Chinese languages are largely dominant in relation to Canada’s other official language.