Introduction
Reflecting on methodology and methods
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v1i1.5Keywords:
heritage language contextsAbstract
This special themed issue includes a selection of articles that emerged from a larger qualitative, ethnographic study of multilingual children’s identity construction, identity politics and cultural positioning in heritage language contexts in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The McGill Multilingual Literacies Research team formed in 2000 is like a microcosm of the very phenomena of multilingualism under consideration. Most team members are people who were multilingual from earliest childhood, went to and/or taught in heritage language contexts and are aware of the nuanced meanings of their particular contexts. Our ‘coming together’ occurred naturally out of a shared interest in the experiences of multilingual students, multiple languages and literacies in a province where French is spoken by a large majority of the population and a city where communities speak in languages from all over the world. Although we have since become more consciously aware of Montreal as a unique space for understanding identity politics and multiple languages (Maguire, Beer, Attarian, Curdt-Christiansen and Yoshida 2005), we were only tacitly aware of its significance in our initial research
endeavours. Indeed we were engaged and immersed in multilingual research without knowing how to do it or that we were consciously doing it! (Roth 2006).
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