10-14-2018, 09:08 PM
(10-14-2018, 07:01 PM)jgsz Wrote:(10-14-2018, 06:36 PM)tomh009 Wrote: The other topic is French immersion. The concern is the early division of students into standard and French immersion, with the latter being more likely to be high performers. Some trustees want to drop French immersion altogether, but Samantha Estoesta's approach is more thoughtful (French immersion does have value in our country) so she got my vote.
Too bad there wasn’t French immersion when I was in school. It would have been my third language but many young people learn languages easily.
I grew up in Montreal and French is in fact my third language (I'm fluent), but I didn't really learn it in school despite attending what was called a "bilingual program," which was one step beyond immersion: we took the same high school provincial exams as those in French schools and some courses with supposedly the same standards as in French schools (French, geography, history...) The thing is that kids speak to their peers in English and that's where most language learning happens.
Having said that, I do think there's value in having immersion. We should at least pay lip service to the other official language. Actual fluency stats for French in Ontario are pretty poor and I don't see that changing, but I appreciate the effort. It feels like the francophone population in many other parts of Canada is higher (the Yukon in particular, about 20% francophone).