plurilingua
I started plurilingua after years of seeing the struggles many parents face when trying to maintain their family languages (and cultures!) while living in an area where they are not the majority languages of the community.
My goal is not only to help families raise plurilingual children, but also to educate educators and medical professionals on the numerous benefits of plurilingualism, pluriculturalism, and translanguaging by dispelling myths and sharing how they can promote these abilities in their classrooms and practices.
Joselyn Brooksbank, PhD
I am a family language advisor with personal, professional, and research experience in multilingual acquisition and heritage/home/family language maintenance.
Living in a bilingual English/Spanish household in Canada, I personally understand the struggles of maintaining a language when it is not the language of the larger community.
I am a self-proclaimed language nerd and have conducted studies focused on family language policy and maintenance, including Parental Attitudes and Practices in Heritage Language Socialisation: Maintaining Spanish and Portuguese in Canada (2022) and Family Language Policy: Parental Discourse Strategies and Child Responses (2017), among others.
Additionally, I am a language instructor and learner, an avid traveller, and have lived and studied in various countries including Spain and England. I am also a certified Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) guide and Montessori enthusiast with a love for Italian coffee, lungo style.
I wear many hats (literally and figuratively) and I am passionate about teaching and helping others improve their lives through my love of languages.
Education
PhD | Spanish (Linguistics) | University of Ottawa
MA | Bilingualism Studies | University of Ottawa
AMI | Casa dei Bambini | Instituto Montessori de México A.C.
BA | Spanish and Linguistics | University of Ottawa