Lauren Schellenberg

Lauren is a doctoral student studying French Immersion teacher training through the Language Acquisition Program at McGill University. Growing up in a thoroughly anglophone neighbourhood of Winnipeg, Lauren had very little exposure to French until the age of 18, when she began her first year of a five-year integrated education program at the University of Winnipeg. In what turned out to be extremely sound career advice, Lauren was encouraged to select French as her teachable major to increase her employability in a saturated market.  What began as pragmatism quickly became passion, and she spent the next half decade reading Proust and trying to memorize the Bescherelle.

Since graduating with her bachelor of education, Lauren has taught French immersion to 6-year-olds and to 60-year-olds, from Manitoba to Nova Scotia. When she came McGill in 2017 to do a master’s in second language education, Lauren availed herself of every opportunity she could find to learn about the theoretical side of language, which frequently involved showing up in linguistics classes where she did not strictly belong. This practice has carried over into her PhD and is supported by the multidisciplinary nature of the Language Acquisition Program.