By Bev Schellenberg
I see the Parti Quebecois are once again hammering BC for our perceived lack of French inclusiveness at last year’s Winter Olympics. Boy, are they going to be mad when they hear about our new language curriculum.
If proposed changes go through, French is about to become just one among a number of language options for elementary and high school students in the province. School districts will be permitted to offer additional languages, such as Mandarin or Punjabi, as well as more immersion programs in languages other than French.
Predictably, this has lovers of la belle langue upset. The Greater Vancouver Language Educators’ Consortium, SFU’s office of francophone and francophiles affairs, and La Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique have all expressed their concern that French will no longer have pride of place. But as The Vancouver Sun‘s Pete McMartin points out, maybe it’s time we dealt with a few glaring facts — such as the fact that, while only 9300 people in Vancouver have French as their mother tongue, fully 19 schools here offer French Immersion. Or the fact that 51 per cent of Vancouver residents identify as a visible minority, largely from East and South Asia.
We run into this contradiction all the time out here, between Canada’s official reality and our real reality. News from BC RCMP detachments slowed to a trickle recently, after provincial headquarters announced that all media releases had to be provided in both English and French. This may have had something to do with the force’s failed experiment in using Google Translate on its website, but the fact is the local Mounties have only one full-time French translator, who’s swamped. And given that the 2006 census shows that 165,975 British Columbians speak Punjabi as their first language, 134,015 speak Cantonese, 89,885 German, 73,325 Mandarin, and 63,000 French, shouldn’t we be attempting to provide translation to the larger language groups anyway?
Which is more important: demonstrating in as many areas of our lives as possible that we are indeed a bilingual nation, or embracing the full range of languages spoken in our communities? I honestly don’t know the answer.
When my children were younger, we lived in North Surrey, BC, a centre of South Asian-Canadian life. My children spoke English to the neighbourhood kids and the neighbourhood kids answered in Punjabi. It became plain that my children needed to learn Punjabi in order to converse with their classmates, so I searched for a program they could enter, but only French Immersion was available in the neighbourhood schools. So we moved.
Now my grade eight daughter and her friends want to study Japanese in the biggest school of the biggest district in BC, and they can’t. Only French and Spanish are offered, and no online option is provided. My son and his best friend would like to study Spanish, but French is mandatory in grades five through seven. French is the language I studied in both elementary and high school, and later couldn’t speak, other than to say “bonjour” as I traveled through France. I can’t even read a cereal box. And I had good marks in French.
However, I also recall trekking through Europe and Africa in pre-baby days, proudly displaying my Canadian flag on my backpack, and having many a conversation with international admirers who expressed how wonderful it is that Canada is a bilingual country. So I’m proud that we’re multicultural and I’m proud that we’re bilingual. I want to continue to live in a bilingual country, but I also want our kids to have access to other languages in our public schools, and I want the government to spend our money to translate information into languages that are useful to those living in each part of Canada.
I want it all. How do you say that in French?
Before being multilingual, you have to be bilingual. In BC, the vast majority of bilingual people are children or immigrants or French Canadians. BC’s new curriculum won’t change anything! It’s all just for show! I hate to admit it (because I don’t like that city), but the most trilingual city in Canada is Montreal. Lo siento BC, pero todos sabemos que los anglosajones son pésimos para los idiomas!
Buena suerte!
I agree fully. It seems to me that the push for French is just a nationalist political project. I don’t really care to be involved in this near-religious enthusiasm for a language that is mostly spoken thousands of kilometers from here. Mexico is closer to us than Quebec, so why aren’t we learning Spanish with more enthusiasm than French? Because of someone else’s political agenda.
The reality is that clearly the most important languages in Vancouver and the surrounding areas include Punjabi, Mandarin and Cantonese. These languages have a long history in Vancouver as well. I believe Spanish is among the top 5 in Vancouver as well, and there are important neighbourhoods where other languages like Italian and others are prevalent.
Sadly, even the new proposed curriculum has some faults. In the same amount of time that students in Germany reach an intermediate B1 or B2 level in a language, the BC proposed curriculum says that our students will only have reached a very early beginner level of A1 or perhaps A2. Why are we aiming for failure? If students complete 4 years of language study and are still A1 or A2, that is a total failure. The Germans would laugh at us (and in fact some of them do, when I tell them the current state of our language teaching).
Also, any real language curriculum has to have a large component of extensive reading. No amount of classroom exercises can replace what is learned simply by sitting down to silently read a book that is enjoyable to you. I learned fluent German by reading the Harry Potter series in German while listening to the German audiobooks, and I believe similar things should be encouraged in our schools. Every language classroom should have a good selection of books in that language for students to borrow.
I couldn’t agree more. Preserving the famous Canadian bilingualism doesn’t automatically mean that we cannot introduce other languages into the school curriculi. On the contrary, everyone should support the idea, since as far as I am concernced, studying languages not only presents stimuli for kids’ brains but also leads to greater inter – cultural understanding we need so badly these times, isn’t it so.
Take a Seat PQ!