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

From: Ja ne znaju (nospam_at_please.com)
Date: 12/15/04 

Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:14:23 -0500

"Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:-Ymdnbyn7tNzw13cRVn-vQ@rogers.com...
>
> "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.

This is exactly how I remember school in Ontario.
>
> 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.

Yes, French was a prescribed credit. You had to take the course.
Accordingly, in Grade Six, I had to take Grade Six French. It was painfully
useless to me, but there was no way around it. In Grade Nine, I took Grade
Nine French...and finally, thereafter, I was allowed to be skipped. I then
took Grade Thirteen French, which was also useless, but was an easy mark for
me.

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.

Again, I am in full agreement here.

>
> 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.

Agreed.
>
> 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.

I have only one point of disagreement here. French-immersion schools do not
force children to function in French, but rather provide them with an
opportunty to do so.

Ja ne znaju.
>
> Neeraj Mathur
>
>

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