@JEKeep Thread:
Etobicoke 1958 - they pioneered elementary-school French for English Canada with a grades 4-8 program where the kids did an hour a day of strictly oral French. No English was spoken during the hour; nothing was read, nothing written. I was in the first cohort. 1/x
Etobicoke 1958 - they pioneered elementary-school French for English Canada with a grades 4-8 program where the kids did an hour a day of strictly oral French. No English was spoken during the hour; nothing was read, nothing written. I was in the first cohort. 1/x
@JEKeep 2 I remember the teacher, Florence Nichols,starting out on the first day by saying: “This is the last English we’re going to speak.” After about five minutes of intro she switched to French & began using classic call-and-response techniques to get us going. 2/x
@JEKeep 3 No child in that school district had done French before Grade 9 until then, or so we were told. In those days we did do grammar in English - parts of speech, phrases & clauses, direct & indirect objects etc. But we didn’t do that in French until secondary. 3/x
@JEKeep 4 By the end of Grade 8 we knew a lot of vocabulary and had a lot of experience with the basic tenses of spoken French. Most important, we’d learned the sounds - especially the tricky ‘r’ and ‘u’ and the nasal vowels - and bits that require a mono anglo to think differently. 4/x
@JEKeep 5 The pronunciation and vocab we learned was international - what some call Parisian. It was what kids in Senegal or Lebanon or Romania learned. Our teachers were fluent in French and skilled at the pedagogy but they weren’t Quebecers or Acadians or Franco-Ontarians. 5/x
@JEKeep 6 We were well prepped for high school, i’d say. As I recall, we went into the same Grade 9 classes as beginners. That was kind of appropriate because we were starting from scratch on the reading & writing - and spelling, which is tough (although not as chaotic as English). 6/x
@JEKeep 7 That international French (including two years post-sec) served me well. I used it all over Europe, in Haiti, and at the United Nations. And in Quebec, although without the same ease or confidence. I learned other languages on the job - more efficiently. 7/x
@JEKeep 8 Outside the regions where French is widely spoken, FSL instruction in Canada faces one great challenge. However immersive the school environment is, it ends at the front door. In the playgrounds, malls, locker rooms and coffee shops, hardly anyone socializes in French. 8/x
@JEKeep 9 There are few, if any, situations where you have to use French to get what you need, or want. The most successful FSL programs are likely to be those that include some kind of exchange component where the immersion is 24-hour. 9/x
@JEKeep 10 I’m not sure anyone should expect even an all-French K-12 program in English Canada to graduate fluent 17-year-old French speakers. Expectations should be more along the lines of thorough familiarity that can lead quickly to fluency in a French-speaking environment. 10/x
@JEKeep 11 Maybe a spoken-only program like the one I started with makes sense since traditional grammar is so little emphasized in the English part of elementary programs. Or maybe it’s the lack of grammar instruction that needs to change. (It certainly wouldn’t hurt.) 11/x
@JEKeep 12 I don’t know what the answer is. I’m not even sure what the question is. Something about making languages part of Canada’s global educational advantage. Within that, 3 frameworks: a) French & English, b) Indigenous languages, c) heritage & globally significant. ????? 12/12
@JEKeep @threadreaderapp unroll pls
