Official Language Bilingualism for Allophones

This article offers a review of policy and research as they relate to Allophones and their access to French Second Official Language (FSOL) programs in English-dominant Canada. Possible areas of future research are woven throughout the re-view as questions emerge in the summary of relevant literature. Notre article comprend une recension des documents de politique et des projets de recherche concernant les Allophones inscrits aux programmes de français langue seconde et officielle (FLSO) au Canada. Tout au long de l’article, nous tis-sons une série de questions de recherche possible pour le futur comme elles ont émergé pendant le développement de la recension des écrits. The Canadian Constitution (Canada, Department of Justice, 1982) guaran-tees equal status to English and French as the official languages of Canada providing for federal government services in both languages. As such, many federal job opportunities at minimum are centered on official-language bilingualism. In addition to linguistic considerations, the federal govern-ment recognizes official-language bilingualism as vital to Canadian identity (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, 2006). The dual privileg-ing of English and French by way of commodity and identity (Heller, 2002), then, encourages immigrants to Canada to consider such proclamations as they establish themselves and reconstruct their identities (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001). As Canada moves forward with its agenda to promote linguistic duality and official-language bilingualism, it must consider the effect of the growin