REFRAMING THE DEBATE ON ANGLO CEGEPS
Francophones attending English colleges rarely abandon mother tongue, study finds
Amid all the concern over the state of the French language in Quebec, one hot-button issue that keeps resurfacing periodically is whether Bill 101 should be applied to college.
Last fall, the Office québécois de la langue française published data showing the proportion of francophone and allophone students who attend CEGEP in English after finishing their primary and secondary education in French as required by law had risen from 18 per cent in 2007 to 25 per cent in 2021.
Although most young people continue their studies in French after high school, it caused political leaders to lament that English colleges are a vector for anglicization. But no government has dared close the door completely on the freedom of choice in higher education that currently exists, although with Bill 96, Premier François Legault did impose new caps on enrolment at English CEGEPS and tighten French proficiency requirements for students to get their diplomas.
Still, the matter is likely far from settled, as the Parti Québécois surges in the polls and fresh concerns about the vitality of the French language and culture, especially among Quebec youth, vex the government and generate headlines.
Yet much of the fear is based on reductionist and gloomy assumptions that English college is a direct and irreversible pathway to living and working in English for young French speakers.
A recent study suggests a much more varied and diverse set of outcomes.
Karine Vieux-fort did her doctoral thesis at Université Laval in 2019 investigating what happens to francophones who choose to attend English CEGEPS as they pursue their degrees and launch their careers.
Her research is included as a chapter in the book Le français en déclin? Repenser la francophonie québécoise, a compendium that is challenging the political narrative that French is in free fall. It calls for a reframing of the debate on how best to protect French in Quebec around more relevant indicators and more inclusive measures.
In an interview, Vieux-fort explained why she decided to dig deeper into a topic that generates so much discussion.
“It comes back constantly, this socio-political debate, where we hear people talking about, `Should we apply Bill 101 to the college level, like we do with primary and secondary? Yes? No?' Every election cycle, it comes back. And it's back again. This questioning is perpetual,” she said. “But there's a certain absence of empirical and scientific data that tells us what really comes from this.”
The few facts and figures that do exist tend to focus on the intentions of students choosing to study in English, rather than what they ultimately do. Other stats focus on young allophones or immigrants, who are specifically targeted by the francization efforts of Bill 101.
But Vieux-fort said she wanted to apply a broader lens and look at the long-term consequences — on francophones in particular. She conducted interviews with 37 mother-tongue French speakers several years after their time in English CEGEP to better understand their experiences and gauge its influence over their lives.
Sifting through the narratives, Vieux-fort said seven categories, or pathways, took shape: anglicization; continuation within English spheres; navigation between French and English; a return to francophone spheres; retention of English skills in the personal sphere; separation from English; and, in one case, a transition to Spanish.
“There's all this questioning about people attending anglophone CEGEPS: Are we losing them for good? My thesis shows more nuance than that. Yes, they anglicize. It's certain. There's no doubt about it,” she said. “But there are many who don't anglicize in all spheres of their life; they navigate between French and English, and English quickly becomes to them a very utilitarian language — for work, for travel, for cultural consumption.”
Only one of the 37 francophones she spoke to migrated mainly to English in their work, social and personal life. Eight of the participants continued in an English milieu in their career and social circles, but French remained predominant in their home lives.
The bulk — 18 of the 37 subjects — found themselves toggling between English and French as they followed various educational or job opportunities, their ease in both languages facilitating in some instances an international mobility. Five of the group spent time in English-speaking environments, but gravitated back to the francophone milieu for various reasons. Two wound up in French professional, social and domestic settings, but sought to maintain their English contacts and competency. Two others eventually abandoned most of their English ties. One person used English CEGEP as a stepping-stone to fluency in a third language, Spanish.
Even Vieux-fort was struck by the intricacy of this tapestry.
“I think it's the richness of all those journeys — that's what surprised me the most. Even myself, I thought at the beginning that it would be fairly simple, that it would be more obvious: people gravitating to environments that were more anglophone, others more francophone. But when I started detailing each journey as part of my analysis, I saw that I had underestimated the richness of the picture that emerged,” she said. “It's not a straight line. Our life trajectories, they're sinuous, they turn — we return to Point A, but we've passed through B, C, D, E, F, G, for instance.”
While she recognizes the limits of her qualitative analysis, which is not designed to detect trends, Vieux-fort hopes it can complement the statistics by cutting through the generalizations that come from ticking boxes.
“If you were doing a quantitative study, and you asked these people, `Do you work in French or English?' They would say French. But that doesn't account for all the time they spent working in English. And the opposite could be true, as well. Someone could respond to a quantitative study, `I work in English.' But maybe it's a new job and for 10, 15 years they worked exclusively in French,” she said. “Sometimes with big samples, we can lose the nuance.”
In her thesis, more so than the book chapter, Vieux-fort also noted that the passage through English CEGEP did not diminish francophone students' linguistic identity, as many politicians seem to fear. In fact, in a few cases, it was reinforced.
“It was very strong in the testimonies that I collected, that it didn't change their identity. They knew very well who they were,” she said. “On a very small scale, it happened for several, that they became more conscious of their francophone identity. They didn't want to change it. We're talking about young people, who are 17 years old mostly when they enter college; they'd done their primary and secondary in French, they grew up in a francophone milieu . ... They don't become a blank slate at 17 from everything they've experienced before then.”
Vieux-fort hopes her findings can help nourish an informed debate about a complicated issue.
“I have no pretensions that my thesis, my research, answers everything. Not at all,” she said. “Everything is not black and white. Mostly it's grey . ... I want people to look at this in a more realistic way.”