A feel for French
A few months ago, I was out with some fellow mom friends having breakfast. Naturally, we were talking about our kids and got on the topic of schools. I couldn’t stop gushing about my son Archie’s school, which just so happens to be an all-French school — one of six across the Island.
A few months ago, I was out with some fellow mom friends having breakfast. Naturally, we were talking about our kids and got on the topic of schools. I couldn’t stop gushing about my son Archie’s school, which just so happens to be an all-French school — one of six across the Island.
These particular friends are first language English-speakers like me, so, for them, the French schools exist as a kind of underground or subcultural phenomenon - everyone has heard of them, but few know what they are about. There are a lot of misconceptions flying around. So, I wasn’t that surprised when one friend turned to me and said, “you’re so lucky! I wish my daughter was in French school or even French immersion, but I don’t speak any French so there’s no way I could help her with her schoolwork.” Parents not speaking French is a common reason given for why they don’t enroll their children in French school. But this barrier to French education may soon be removed.
Enter Mary MacPhee: PhD student at UPEI whose work explores the experiences of non-francophone parents with children in the French schools, as well as possible solutions for the language/identity issues they have. MacPhee says she was inspired by her own personal experience, “we have felt awkward as non-francophone parents with our children at the French school, despite my French Acadian heritage and French language proficiency. I observed many other nonfrancophone parents at the school, I wondered how they felt or were involved, and that is how the research began.” From there, she formed partnerships and launched a pilot project in 2012-2013. The goal of the project was to test certain strategies in the French schools to see which ones successfully engaged parents in the francisation of their children. A program of activities was generated and the data and results MacPhee collected from the pilot project informed her study that will soon be published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics. MacPhee’s research shows that non-francophone parents need to feel welcome, involved and understood. The good news is that there are ways that nonfrancophone parents can work together with school boards to help their kids learn and master French.
The difficulty lies in negotiating effective communication strategies with non-francophone parents while remaining faithful to the French schools’ French-only policies. But, MacPhee says, “some of (the solutions for parental involvement) have already been acted on,” and the schools continue to explore new ways to better include non-francophone parents and new tools for French study outside of school hours.