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Meet This Year's Winners of SSHRC and FRQSC Scholarships

Each year, theÌý (FRQSC) and the S (SSHRC) award prestigious scholarships to top-ranked candidates across the province and the country. We are very pleased to announce that four graduate students from À¦°óSMÉçÇø's Language Education program have won this year's major scholarships:

Alexa Ahooja has won the FRQSC doctoral scholarship. Her PhD research, supervised by Dr. Susan Ballinger, is titled Newcomer Students’ Linguistic Integration into Québec French Schools: Between Lived Experiences and Policies. The study aims to uncover and deconstruct plurilingual students’ language socialization experiences from their point of entry to the Québec French school system. Alexa will examine their everyday language experiences and practices at school and in their homes-while paying great attention to their own, their parents’ and their teachers’ perspectives about issues surrounding these students’ academic, linguistic and identity development.

Marianne Barker has won the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship. Her PhD research, supervised by Dr. Susan Ballinger, is titled Improving Canadian Integration of Immigrants: An Exploration of the Government-Funded Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada Program. The study aims to find ways to improve newcomers’ social integration in Canada. This award will support Marianne's long-term goals of working in academia by providing opportunities for the development, research and professional skills.

Austin Learning has won the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master's Scholarship. His MA research, supervised by Dr. Susan Ballinger, is titled Supporting Language Skills of Pre-service French as a Second Language Teachers. The study aims to improve the grammatical accuracy and language awareness of pre-service French as a second language (FSL) teachers by means of a crosslinguistic pedagogical intervention with a comparative linguistic focus. This means that the intervention aims to facilitate the learning of certain French grammatical structures through explicit analysis of and comparison to the corresponding English grammatical structures.

Paul J. Meighan has won the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship. His PhD research, supervised by Dr. Mela Sarkar and Dr. Blane Harvey is titled Indigenous Language Revitalization using TEK-nology: Can Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Technology Stimulate a Growth in Speakers? TEK-nology. This is a fully immersive Indigenous knowledge/language acquisition method, proposed to assist in culturally, emotionally and environmentally responsive Indigenous language revitalization. The idea is to co-create with his married family’s Indigenous community a series of free-to-access language learning videos of land-based interactions between fluent speakers and learners in the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) language.

Congratulations to this year's winners of these prestigious scholarships. We wish you success in your research journey!

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