LANGUAGE PROGRAMS BROADEN STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Kate Wasden already had a solid background in Spanish by the ninth grade, when her family moved to Calgary. Determined not to lose her language skills, she enrolled in Webber Academy as soon as she arrived.
Webber’s comprehensive Spanish as a Second Language program — it was the first in Alberta to offer it at the elementary level — was a natural fit for Wasden, who attended the school for the next four years.
Now a 19-year-old premed student back in the United States, she looks forward to being able to communicate fluently with her future patients.
“In an increasingly connected world, learning another language is important because our relationships are no longer restricted to where we are from or where we live,” says Wasden.
“The connections you make are worldwide. Speaking another language is also a portal to different backgrounds, histories and cultures.”
That’s also true for learning another language at Webber, which also offers Mandarin at the elementary level and French in junior and senior high. In addition to studying art, food, dance and other cultural elements, students like Wasden attend immersion trips for two weeks in Spain, South America, France or China.
Wasden says her trips to Costa Rica and Spain, where she was placed with local families while helping with community service projects and attending daily language classes, were a lifechanging experience.
“Getting a new glimpse of social lives and familial setups, and having a chance to really explore, stimulates your curiosity about the world in ways I never would have been able to experience otherwise,” she says.
In the process of learning a second language, powerful neural connections are added to the brain, which increases mental agility in all areas, says Calgary French International School head Margaret Dorrance.
“Learning a second language also opens the hearts and minds of children to other cultures, and to developing an international mindset.”
At CFIS, students are immersed in French starting in preschool and graduate fluent in French, English and Spanish. It is the only independent school in Calgary that is part of the international UNESCO network of schools and follows the four pillars of learning, including learning values implicit within intercultural understanding, respect and peace at all levels of society.
For students with little to no prior exposure to the French language, Lycee Louis Pasteur offers a program unique in Calgary. The French Language Immersive Program, or FLIP, allows students in grades 1 through 5 to get individualized instruction in a small class setting, before integrating into the bilingual stream by the end of the school year or even in a matter of months.
The French curriculum is taught in French by native French speakers and the Alberta curriculum is taught in English by native English speakers, creating bilingual students who get the best of both worlds.
A third language, Spanish, is offered between grades 8 and 12. In addition, the school runs an annual trip for the Grade 8 students to France each year.
“All our students from grades 9 to 12 can apply for a six-week to four-month exchange on any of our 497 network schools,” says Amy Pollard, director of finance and operations at the Lycee.
In the end, a successful second language program will have a vision that is much broader than a travel course, says Kasia Noworyta-Fridman, who has taught Spanish at Webber Academy for the past 20 years.
“The end goal is not to order a meal in a restaurant; it is to create educated speakers who understand people who think and have been informed differently.
“I say, ‘I don’t teach Spanish; I teach students.’ A lot of what we do goes beyond language. Our students are people who travel, who are interested in other cultures, and not afraid of differences between people, or to communicate with locals and go off the beaten path.”
Noworyta-Fridman is currently working on mastering her eighth language, German — she already speaks Italian, French, Portuguese, Polish and Russian in addition to English and Spanish.
“There is a proverb that says, ‘You live as many times as the languages you speak.’ It really resonated with me. Languages do open doors for you — I have lived it.”