Education

Education

As the global economy warms up, educators everywhere take a lesson from Canada's quarter-century experiment in French immersion
Published: The Globe and Mail, November 23, 1991, FOCUS
BY DEBORAH JONES, VANCOUVER
WHILE contentious language issues bedevil the country, Canada can take some small comfort in knowing it is considered a world leader in teaching children a second language. Canadian immersion experts say requests for information are increasing from the United States, Singapore, China, Brazil, Australia, Wales and several European countries.

The U.S., for example, has embraced Canadian-style immersion enthusiastically. This year about 7,000 American children are immersed in Spanish, French and Japanese - most of the instruction modelled on Canada's program. "I don't know if Canadians realize how much their model has affected what is going on in education here," says Nancy Rhodes, a research associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D. C.

U.S. courses began in California in 1971, and the 100 schools across the U.S. that now offer immersion programs base them on the Canadian model, Ms. Rhodes says. She knows of Canadian-style immersion programs in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

"Immersion is probably the best thing that ever happened to Canadian education," says Ms. Rhodes. "It's a fantastic program for parents who want their child to learn French."

Driving much of the international interest in immersion are the demands of business, the increasing strength of the European Community and the perception that people from different cultures and countries will have to talk to one another more as the world's economy becomes increasingly global.

"An MBA degree is not enough in deals with Japanese, Chinese and others," says Andre Obadia, a professor of French education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. "A good MBA is a person who knows how to communicate, how to present ideas, how to relate to people."

Ms. Rhodes says American studies show that parents enroll their children in immersion partly because they believe a second language will help their children's careers. Recent studies show that 22 per cent of American elementary schools teach a second language.

Americans are "looking at careers, the whole global situation, and seeing their country more in a global perspective," she says. "The U.S. has so long been isolated, and we felt we didn't have to know other languages - everyone else would know ours. I think people are now beginning to realize we need to know other languages."

Josalys Scott, executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Parents for French, says her lobby organization has also been asked for information from European countries and from U.S. parents' groups. "In the U.S., they seem to rationalize language learning as being part of education, as good for kids, useful for business and for positioning the U.S. in a competitive world and useful internally for service communication in stores and hospitals."

Prof. Obadia, who was recently asked to give a speech on immersion in Madrid, says, "Canada has become a real language laboratory. Europe is intrigued because of the European Community's (integration) in 1992. They want to see how languages are learned in an immersion type of setting, so they can learn European languages faster."

Prof. Obadia sees a certain irony in the fact that others are attracted to learning methods in Canada, where language issues seem to cause so much strife: "In Europe, it's normal to speak three or four languages," but in Canada learning a new one is "perceived as a big thing." Because the new language is usually French, "there are all kinds of prejudice, baggage, that come into play." OVER the past 2 decades, French immersion has become one of Canada's most popular education choices. More than 265,000 Canadian children from non- francophone families check their mother tongues at a classroom door to spend the day learning lessons in French.

School boards across the country say there has been no decline in French-immersion enrolments in recent years, despite persistent rumours of a fall-off since the failure of the Meech Lake accord. Indeed, the Ottawa office of the Commissioner of Official Languages estimates that enrolment increased to about 288,000 students in 1990-91, up 23,000 from the year before.

The continued increase may be partly due to pent-up demand, inasmuch as boards have lacked sufficient resources to register all the students who wanted French immersion. Now there are signs that some waiting lists are not as long as they were two or three years ago - the list in Vancouver has dwindled, for example - but officials say the reasons for the decrease are not yet clear.

Immersion programs in the U.S. are running into some of the same problems Canada's courses have encountered. The biggest one is the lack of teachers. Says Ms. Rhodes: "For French immersion, sometimes we do get Canadian French teachers, sometimes American-trained teachers who are educated and have fluency in the language."

Even in Canada, the lack of teachers remains a problem. British Columbia, for example, requires 200 new immersion teachers each year, but only graduates 50 from provincial universities. B.C. school boards still have to recruit French-immersion teachers from Quebec and New Brunswick.

Canadian schools pay higher wages than American schools, and recruitment efforts by American officials have not made a big dent on Canadian teaching numbers, say officials. Still, Prof. Obadia notes that American recruitment officials always attend the annual national convention of French-immersion teachers - to the ire of some staff-hungry Canadian school boards.

While Canadian language-immersion methods are just starting to take off in other countries, the model has been around in Canada long enough for some unexpected twists to develop. Observers believe that the phenomenal growth of French-immersion enrolment by anglophones has been fuelled by parents' desires to expand their children's cultural horizons and improve their career prospects. In Quebec, however, the emphasis in language education has shifted to helping francophone children retain their own language.

A recent Statistics Canada study found that 7 per cent of anglophone children outside Quebec could conduct a conversation in French. The same survey found that 5 per cent of francophone children inside Quebec could conduct a conversation in English.

"That was surprising because we always thought the francophones (in Quebec) were more bilingual than the anglophones outside Quebec," says a statistician with the federal agency. "For school-age children, that is no longer true."

Canadian advocates of French immersion insist that no matter what happens in the current round of constitutional talks, the language program has gained enough momentum that it will continue to grow. "It's never a waste of time to learn a second language, and because of the heritage and the nature of Canada it will never be futile to learn French," says Pat Brehaut of Sherwood Park, Alta., president of Canadian Parents for French. "It opens doors to knowledge, improves communication skills and provides an advantage in the increasingly competitive global workplace. French and English are world languages, and in Canada, no matter its future, there will be a need to talk to and with the francophones of Quebec and elsewhere."

Pat Sherwood, president of the group's provincial chapter in Nova Scotia, says perhaps international interest in Canada's French immersion model will give it a boost inside the country. "It's a typical Canadian phenomenon. We always have to have other people notice our successes, and they're not always sold as strongly in our own backyards."

Copyright Deborah Jones 1991
About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted.
Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted

The world's largest language lab

Home Report Think Explore Essay Play About