K-12 immersion not the only way to parlez
The news that B.C. is not alone among the provinces in struggling to find teachers to teach French immersion programs is not just bad news for parents wanting to see their children become bilingual. It is, in a social and political sense, bad news for Canada.
B.C. Education Ministry statistics indicate that the popularity of immersion among parents has increased by 27 per cent in the past 10 years to the point that, at last count, there were nearly 54,000 students in French-immersion kindergarten to Grade 12.
That is almost 10 per cent of the entire public-school population in B.C.
The No. 1 problem in meeting the need for more teachers has not even been finding teachers who are fluent enough in French, but has been finding teachers who are just good teachers and who are suitably expert to teach both French and English at the various grade levels.
The basic French immersion curriculum is taught entirely in French during the first years, and instruction in both English language and French comes in later years.
There is no doubt that bilingual ability provides career opportunities for kids who are comfortable in both French and English. No argument there, but parents enrol their children in early and late immersion programs for a variety of reasons.
Not all of those reasons are to do with language acquisition and career prospects, but before I bring the wrath of the admirably supportive Canadian Parents for French down on my head, let me say that as an administrator and later as a consultant to school districts, I have been responsible for organizing or reorganizing French immersion programs in at least three school districts to the benefit of those programs.
In one semi-rural district where parents requested an early French immersion program, elementary schools were scattered all over the geography. It was not feasible to initiate the early French immersion program in one school but not another, as ministry policy expected.
What made local sense was to introduce the program at Grade 8 in the town centre’s junior secondary school, where many Grade 7s came to begin the next stage of their education.
This was considered unconventional in the light of ministry policy of the day regarding immersion programs, but thanks in part to a gifted, fluent Anglo-Québécois teacher already working in the district, the program was judged a success.
In the course of researching models of unconventional but effective language immersion programs, I had been expecting to find examples along the U.S. and Mexican border, or at least in truly bilingual Los Angeles.
To my surprise, the most highly regarded program was in Provo, Utah, at the Missionary Training Centre of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The context-based teaching system that the centre uses in its nine-week intensive language-instruction program involves immersing students in their new language from waking to sleep.
The very practical goal at the centre is not academic or even political, but is intended to prepare young LDS missionaries for their two-year missions, often in a country of whose language they had no previous experience.
Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. The notion is that by the end of the two-year mission in a new language environment, actual fluency would, through necessity, be developed.
The Grade 8 program we devised in our rural district was certainly not this kind of crash course. Nevertheless, beginning French immersion at the first year of junior secondary, unconventional as it seemed to be, proved effective, thanks substantially to the qualities the teacher brought to the program.
That experience left me wondering whether a K-12 immersion program was the only route to functional language ability and eventual fluency.
But all of that is really beside the point when it comes to the role of language in learning about the reality of Canada’s bilingualism and multiculturalism.
For me, an Australian-born Canadian living in B.C. for the past 38 years, official policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism were just the intellectual foundation for understanding Canada.
What eventually did it for me was spending time immersed in Canadian history in Quebec City and, later, experiencing the welcoming warmth and affability of Québécois people in the Eastern Townships outside Montreal.
If French immersion opens up opportunities for western-provinces English-speaking kids to understand about all of Canada, that is a good thing.
Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously expressed hope for Canada by saying: “Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them. Bilingualism can play a role in achieving that.”