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.
Public data reveals that many BC schools report having “zero” English language learners (ELLs) -- this includes nearly 100 schools in Metro Vancouver, where nearly 50% of residents speak a first language other than English. These are primarily independent schools; according to the Federation of Independent School Associations of BC, because these schools do not receive "per-student" funding, they may have little incentive to report ELLs to the Ministry. However, there may be additional reasons relating to public perceptions of English Language Learners, and the sometimes stigmatizing and politically contentious issues which arise when certain students are designated as ELLs while others are not. Public and scholarly discussions of students for whom English is an additional language often focuses on their dissimilarity from native English speakers in terms of English language skills. This has been called a “deficit discourse” (Shapiro, 2014), “deficit model” (Khan, 2020), or “deficit identity” (Marshall, 2009) for those students, with their “lack” of English proficiency being positioned as a problem to be overcome, rather than developing bilingual ability and fluency in another language being embraced as an asset. In recent years, there have been scholarly discussions of the stigma and harm the “ELL” label can cause (e.g., Linse, 2013; Gunderson, 2020; Flores et al. 2015; Nguyen, 2021; Umansky, 2016). So are BC schools being progressive by refusing to “label” students as ELLs, or are they reinforcing the deficit discourse by positioning “ELL” as an undesirable designation? This project seeks to understand the source of this puzzling mismatch, and contribute to understanding how students are labelled “ELLs” in schools, the media, and public discourse generally, both by looking at descriptive statistics from schools’ reports of ELLs and looking at selected BC schools' websites to analyze the way ELLs, English language education, and related concepts are represented.
