Representations of Language Education in Canadian Newspapers

This article examines the salience and content of representations of language education in a corpus of English- and French-Canadian newspapers. Findings suggest that English-Canadian newspapers foreground official language education issues, in which public schools are represented as the primary means by which Canadians can gain equal access to social resources. In contrast, French-Canadian newspapers do not foreground language education issues; in the few cases where these are discussed, the focus tends to be specifically on immigrant acquisition of French. Since representations of these issues reflect beliefs and attitudes toward languages, the paper concludes that they also reveal the successes and failures of discourses concomitant with Canada's language policy.