The Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers began in the early 1970s, so we're over 40 years old. It was created out of a grassroots movement of teachers trying to work in French, teach in French, without any educational material or professional development. This is how it began. Today we're still doing it. We try to provide our new teachers with professional development, professional training, professional information, dissemination of research so that they can apply it in their school rooms, and educational and pedagogical materials.
That's basically our first mandate, to help teachers do and improve their job. Our mission is to promote excellence in teaching a second language. We do this for French and English, but we do it for other languages as well. We had a conference at the end of April in Winnipeg where, of the nine streams that we have for our conference, one was totally dedicated to aboriginal languages. We try to promote aboriginal languages as well. We try to exchange best practices in education at that level. We also have multi...Japanese, Spanish, and German as well, but our main focus is French and English.