Bilinguality and giftedness in a Canadian public school: toward a new approach to accommodating bilinguals within a monolingual classroom

This exploratory study investigates the intersection of bilinguality and giftedness in the public school system in Ontario and the connection between the bilinguality of gifted immigrant minority language (IML) speakers and their giftedness. Following a series of semistructured interviews with gifted pupils and teachers in the gifted program in an Ontario elementary school, it was concluded that the bilinguality of gifted IML students who are literate in their home language is not utilized for either curricular or community-building purposes. Drawing on recent research in psycholinguistics of bilinguality, this paper argues that the bilinguality of gifted IML students constitutes a cognitive asset that should be used for curricular purposes in the gifted program, suggesting potential ways to accommodate the continued bilingual development of the students within the largely monolingual framework of the Ontario curriculum. These potential ways are situated within the current research on biliteracy and critical literacy.