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BC TEAL is proud to present our 2025 Annual Conference: Disruptive Educational Practices: Strategies for Transformation.

Educators shine in times of change to face unexpected challenges. This is when creativity flourishes by combining proven practices with fresh and innovative ideas. These times call for transformation which can be rooted in tradition or experience, or it can arise through unexplored approaches. The synthesis of old and new ideas drives meaningful progress. Join other insightful and creative educators as we flourish within the power of our community.
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Anti-Racist Pronunciation Pedagogy for CELBAN: First Nations English Dialects
Friday May 2, 2025 1:00pm - 1:45pm PDT
Poster Session
The goal of this session is to suggest a new chapter in the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) listening workbook. CELBAN is designed to assess the English proficiency of Internationally Educated Nurses (IEN).  The current CELBAN workbooks have no mention of Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations peoples of Canada. People entering Canada with hopes of working in the medical field need to be aware of First Nations English Dialects (FNED) (Ball, J., Bernhardt, B., & Deby, J., 2006; Ball, J., & Bernhardt, B.M., 2008; Bird, K. R., E., 2011; Fadden, L., & LaFrance, J., 2008) in addition to the Canadian history of colonialism and how this affects Indigenous people in healthcare today. Drawing on theories regarding Anti-Racist Pronunciation pedagogy and the responsibility of the listener (Ramjattan, 2023), this poster session argues that IENs must learn about FNED in order to meet the CELBAN requirements of identifying motivations, purposes, attitudes, and intention of speech. Focusing on sharing phonological resources and using each other’s pronunciation practices, encouraging a desire to understand one another despite barriers, and the creation of strategies for communication breakdown (Ramjattan, 2023, p. 321), the presenters suggest that this transformative approach could play a useful role at the intersection of the two broad communities in question. The presenters suggest an addition to the CELBAN Listening Handbook and Assessment, including audios of different dialects of English in Canada, with a primary focus on FNED, to facilitate an awareness of different pronunciations. By addressing the gap in CELBAN, the presenters are able to make suggestions to promote culturally safe care for the communities within Canada that require it the most. More implicitly, the presenters’ aim is also to help IENs with gaining confidence in their own pronunciations. The poster suggestions are thereby transferable to practitioners’ contexts, since the presenters argue that listening skills should be taught with an emphasis on understanding different accents in Canada with a grounding in APP and theories of decolonization in the EAL classroom.  
Speakers
avatar for Meghan Jones

Meghan Jones

Student and Research Assistant, University of Victoria
Meghan Jones works on SSHRC-funded research for the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Culture Applied Linguistics Department at the University of Victoria. 
AA

Anna Armanca

Student, University of Victoria
Anna Armanca is a student in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture Applied Linguistic department at the University of Victoria
Friday May 2, 2025 1:00pm - 1:45pm PDT
Poster Session
  English for Specifc Purposes (ESP), Indigenization

Attendees (3)


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