A Look at French Immersion
Housed in charming little Elmlea school, set on a tree-lined street in northwest Toronto, Cindy Auwaerter’s Grade 4 classroom features typical clusters of desks, colourful bulletin boards, and a checkerboard-pattern carpet in the centre of the room. But in this serene setting, a remarkable intersection of cultures and languages can be found—the 25 students, in characteristic Toronto fashion, have been drawn from nearly a dozen cultures, from the Middle East to Africa to the Caribbean. They speak English with one another out on the grassy playground, but in this class it’s en français, s’il vous plait. From the decor—posters and handwritten sheets display math (L’arrondissement des nombres), science (Qu’est-ce qu’un habitat?) and language (Les adjectifs possessifs)—to the gentle yet concise words that flow from Madame Auwaerter and the social chatter in the room, the children are completely immersed in French.
And it’s clear that they, in turn, have embraced the language, in work and play. Ten-year-old Ammar uses his French skills as a sibling secret code. “Sometimes me and my brother will be talking and we don’t want Mom to listen, so we just start talking in French,” he says with a broad smile. Some are thinking ahead. “Let’s say you want a job but they only have one place. If there’s another person who only speaks English but you speak English and French, they’ll give you the job because you know more languages,” says Bryan, also 10. “My hope,” says Auwaerter, “is that French immersion will take them anywhere in the world that they want to go.”
A BILINGUAL BRAIN IS BETTER
French immersion (FI) made its debut in 1965 at a single pilot school in an English-speaking Montreal suburb. Enrollment boomed in the late ’70s and the ’80s, with programs opening in school boards from coast to coast as part of the federal government’s newly introduced policies on bilingualism and multiculturalism. Today, FI—a public education program designed for non-French speakers that teaches all or most subjects in French—can be found in every province and two of three territories (Nunavut is the exception). A made-in-Canada approach, this style of education has also been exported to a number of countries around the world. And while the boomtown days are gone, FI continues to show modest growth. At last count, in 2006, some 309,000 students (7.7 per cent of total eligible enrollment) were enrolled between JK and Grade 12, more than a third of them in Ontario. Certain places, including parts of British Columbia and areas of Toronto, are experiencing sharp rates of growth, and some school districts have even adopted lottery systems to allot available places (a better option than parents lining up overnight prior to registration day or registering their child while in utero, which had been happening in B.C.).
see all contests
