I Am In The Current ~ The stream is digital.

Well what do you know!

Drape’s Takes discusses a similar topic as my previous blog post. Please remove French Immersion and replace with technology and presto!He could not be more right when he says “there’s honestly no better way (to learn) than by taking the plunge”.

Read Drape’s blog post here.

Read my previous post here.

My home school is just what I have always wanted as a French teacher- a French center. In my previous school division, teachers would bring up the concept of a single track French school and speak favorably of such a program for a local school. Regina Catholic School Division had one school that the teachers of Regina Public always referred to with envy. We wanted a single track French school in our division. If there were one, we would want to teach at that school.

For French Immersion teachers it is difficult to get students to buy into French. In Saskatchewan, French is often the un-cool thing. Whenever I had discussions with students who refused to speak French, I would often think of British Columbia’s French Immersion reality. In BC, parents sign their kids up for a lottery draw so that they may have the chance to attend a French Immersion school. In that province, the demand is huge and the programs available are limited. In Saskatchewan, there were days when it seemed as if you were fighting all day with certain kids to speak French. While doing so, you’d think about the kids and parents who were doing everything possible to have this opportunity and wonder what that must be like. French was un-cool when I went to school and it still seems to be that way today. Money continues to be spent to increase the public opinion of French in Saskatchewan. Check out this site. I used to drive by two billboard adds on the way to and from work for this add campaign in Regina.

In a dual track school there are two types of students- the French Immersion students and the English students. Both groups play on the same playground. They attend the same assemblies. They walk down the same hallways. The major difference is the language of instruction in their classroom. In the French Immersion classroom (after grade 2), the teacher and the students only speak French- unless it’s English Language Arts. French Immersion teachers tell their students that French is cool and important and try to validate the language and culture. However, everything that is “important” in the school is done in English. I may be taking some liberty to say that students quickly understand that French is fine for the classroom, but that’s where it stays- a shackled language confined to the walls of a classroom. I firmly believe that a dual-track school proves and models this to the students. When supervising kids on the playground I would often speak French to the French Immersion students. “It’s recess time! I don’t have to speak French now!” was not an uncommon answer to anything said in French.

During conversations with French Immersion colleagues I found out they were equally frustrated. Not only with the language being confined to the classroom but with the environment of the school for staff. Many of us were frustrated to go into the staff room and to be obligated to speak French because someone may not understand what we were saying. Granted not all the staff felt this way. Some French Immersion teachers didn’t want to speak French outside of class hours and obviously that’s ok. In my opinion, my previous home-school was an English school that accommodated French Immersion students. What is weird about this statement is that the French Immersion program made up more then two-thirds of the school population and was set to grow with a recent relocation of French Immersion students from another Regina Public School. So how could this be? The school was in an English province’s capital city and the majority of the population did not value second language instruction.

Back to the present tense. My new school in Saskatoon Public is great for all the reasons that my previous school was less-then-ideal. Keep in mind that I barely scrapped the surface of this issue in this blog post. I would love to see comparative data of language acquisition in a single versus a dual-track school.

My new school is a French center where students are expected to speak French at all times unless it’s English Language Arts. Staff speak French in the hallways and in the staffroom. During staff meetings we speak English out of courtesy for our Administrative Assistant who is in attendance. This school is the only single-track school in the division. All other French Immersion schools in Saskatoon are dual-track. I am very pleased to be at this school experiencing this school model. I am sure I spend just as much time telling students to speak French as I did previously. There is much to be said about having the ability to offer a French center along with a living French model to French Immersion students that in-turn empowers a French Immersion teacher.

I would love to hear others views and opinions on single and dual-track schools and the ideas brought forward in this blog post.

When using Googlepedia with Firefox, if you perform a Google search for “French Speaking Rubric”, the Wikipedia article that is shown is none other then FRANCOPHOBIA! That’s a bit of an odd match… Nevertheless, I still love this Firefox add-on.