Re: Bilingualism has ruined Canada but there is still hope.

From: Neeraj Mathur (neemathur_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/15/04 

Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:57:37 -0500

"mb" <azythos2@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1103081218.249154.186480@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> However, in many places --take Switzerland (where applicable), Finland,
> even Belgium-- the fact is that it's not even imaginable that anyone
> would finish high without the minimum requirements in the other
> language. I am not familiar with the Canadian school curriculum.

The curriculum is set by the provincial governments - therefore, each
province has a completely different school system. In Ontario (where I
live), the high school curriculum has been changed recently.

Under the old system, high school was modular: students were given some
degree of freedom to choose courses which lasted for half a year, with the
expectation that a student could complete eight courses in a year. To
graduate from high school, thirty courses were the basic minimum required.
Of those thiry, fourteen were to some degree prescribed: it was necessary,
for instance, to have five English courses, two maths, two sciences, one
arts, etc. The remaining sixteen could be filled as the student wished.
Universities required that students present, as part of their thirteen
credits, at least six credits at the OAC level (which corresponded to the
fifth year of high school, or grade 13), one of which had to be English.

Under this system, one of the fourteen prescribed credits was French. This
was usually done in the first year of high school, Grade Nine. After this,
French became optional. French instruction was usually started in elementary
school, although there was some flexibility as to when it started. The
school board where I lived started French in Grade Four, that is, when the
student was about nine years old. A school board where I used to live
started French in Grade One, when the student was six years old. Still, the
Grade Nine French course was at the same level across the province.

It is not possible to consider oneself a Francophone having only completed
Grade Nine French. At this point, the student really only knows three
tenses: the present, the compound past with etre/avoir, and the 'near
future' with aller. The knowledge of pronouns is limited, as relative
pronouns and emphatic personal pronouns are not introduced until the next
year or two. Essentially, the student is equipped only to deal with a short
tourist visit to a French speaking region with the expectation that people
there will be charmed at the attempts of the student to speak their language
and then switch to English.

Even after OAC French, there is still a long way to go. I took French
through to OAC and in my final year we were expected to read 'Bildungsroman'
type juvenile trash literature - I rebelled and read Hugo's 93 instead. I
still have difficulty following French TV and French radio. I am building on
my skills here at Oxford and will soon be able to overcome my difficulties
to some degree - I want to take the DALF next year - but I am quite
disillusioned with the quality and curriculum of second-language French
teaching in Ontario.

My expectation is that the new curriculum will not have greatly improved the
situation, if indeed it has bothered to change it at all. The new curriculum
was crafted with a utilitarian perspective, and most of the humanities -
including languages - were not ranked high by that government which brought
in the reforms. They focussed on functional literacy and numeracy - and
created a system that sends people to university as math majors who have
never even heard the word 'integrand'.

It might be questioned why French has suffered so much in Ontario. I must
stress that there is a large perception amongst the population of the
Toronto area that French is essentially useless. The communities here do not
conform to the black and white of US daytime television, nor the French and
English of the Canadian constitution. The largest non-English speaking
communities here speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu or Punjabi as first
languages, while the most well represented European langauges other than
English are Italian, Spanish and various Slavic languages (the Polish and
Ukrainian communities are particularly strong). In York region (to the
northwest of the City of Toronto), high schools began cutting down on
Shakespeare in the English curriculum because too many of their students
were Chinese-speaking ESL students - struggling with modern standard
English, Shakespeare was simply beyond their grasp. In such an environment,
the point of forcing French - and that through English - is not really
obvious. To compound difficulties of usefulness, the schools specifically
ignore Quebecois dialects or accents, focussing on 'Parisian' French, so the
idea of stitching together a disparate nation does not really manifest
itself. Still, there are French-immersion schools in the public system where
children are forced to function in a French environment from an early age:
these are decidedly more successful than the FSL programs through
English-medium schools.

Neeraj Mathur

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