Forty years after its introduction, Canada’s nationalist concept of bilingualism will inevitably transform into an international concept. Learning any second language will increase a child’s chances for success.
As our world becomes a smaller and more accessible place, many parents, seeking the advantage of a second language for their children, are flooding French-language immersion programs.
Since the 2004/5 school year, the number of French immersion programs in B.C.’s public schools has grown dramatically. Enrolment in French immersion is up by 38 per cent or 49,500 students. French immersion is offered in 46 of 60 school districts.
At the same time, enrolment in traditional French-as-a-second-language classes, usually about 12 per cent of class time, has declined by 22 per cent.
That’s not surprising, given that our kids will emerge from their formal education into a multilingual world where the ability to function in a second language, especially French, Spanish or Mandarin, as opposed to simply having an academic knowledge of another language, will be advantageous to those entering an increasingly competitive career market.
But there is more to the story.
More than a hundred languages are spoken in Canada and, according to Statistics Canada, while English and French account for 59 per cent and 23 per cent of Canadians’ mother tongues respectively, only 18 per cent of the population, nearly 5.2 million people — define themselves as bilingual in any language.
Recruiters to the job market often see bilingualism as a sign of experience and education. Moreover, when two employees have equal skills, companies are more likely to promote a bilingual employee.
Research indicates that bilingual employees are perceived as more sociable and diligent (learning another language is no mean feat). As one employer put it: “Having bilingual skills in a rapidly changing world makes the employee much more flexible and more valuable to the company in their capacity to adapt.”
Nearly a third of all the hiring managers contacted by CareerBuilder.com in 2006 said that they would recruit more bilingual employees. A study by Canadian Heritage concluded that bilinguals can find a job and change jobs more easily than unilinguals.
Some years ago, working in a rural district, I was approached by a group of parents who wanted their kids to have access to French immersion. Given the geography of the district, which saw children from widely distributed elementary schools “come to town” to begin secondary school, it was decided to look for a model that could start the kids off in French immersion at the Grade 8 level.
Ministry programs at that time, and even now, provided only two immersion options, both in French: early immersion beginning in kindergarten or late immersion beginning in Grade 6.
Since neither would have satisfied the need in that district, I began to look for other models of immersion language instruction, expecting to find them down along the U.S.-Mexican border.
To my surprise, the most innovative and successful program was and still is in Utah. Not what I would have expected.
A context-based program was being used in Provo’s Missionary Training Centre to prepare young Mormon men and women to be at least functionally bilingual, if not fully fluent, for their two-year missions.
The soon-to-be missionaries spend nine additional weeks, beyond their other classes, in language training. Two years in the country of their mission does the rest to develop fluency.
Here in B.C., our public schools are already populated by many students who are bilingual and who speak a language other than English at home.
In Vancouver’s school district, which serves more than 60,000 students, only 63 per cent of new registrants have English as their first language at home. Chinese languages are the home languages in 40 per cent of homes where English is not spoken.
In North Vancouver, 80 per cent of the kids come from English-speaking homes, followed by the remainder who speak Persian, Korean, Tagalog (Filipino), Mandarin, Spanish and Japanese.
Perhaps the time has come for B.C. schools to consider some variation of an intense, short-term Utah-type of language program as an option in the senior grades. By Grade 11 or 12, many kids are considering career options that will be international in scope. A functional grasp of another language would be an asset.
Quite apart from that, any ability to access another culture in their own language, even at a rudimentary level of fluency, opens doors to important understandings about who else populates our planet and who are the people with whom we will, increasingly and by necessity it seems, be doing business.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
