Canada Targets Youth to Make State Bilingualism a Reality : Language: The nation has two official tongues, but most speak only English. One remedy--immersing students in French--has stirred controversy.

Only 4 million of this officially bilingual country’s 26.5 million people are officially bilingual, and most of them are French Canadians who learned English.

The main effort to remedy that situation and fulfill national policy is called French immersion, which now involves 7.3% of all schoolchildren.

Every weekday, more than 250,000 English-speaking children troop to classrooms around the country and spend all or most of the day studying in French. Enrollment increases every year.

“Unlike French programs 20 years ago, which graduated students who could not speak French, sometimes after nine years of studying the language, French immersion programs are producing functionally bilingual graduates,” said D’Iberville Fortier, Canada’s commissioner of official languages.

Herns Pierre-Jerome, head of French immersion at Lawrence Park High School in Toronto, added: “Students in the program not only have an opportunity to master a language, but in terms of learning, they are open to other dimensions.”

Ever since the British sneaked up on the French at Quebec in 1759 and defeated them on the Plains of Abraham, French-speakers have been at a disadvantage. They make up a quarter of Canada’s population, but their minority thrives only in the province of Quebec and in scattered pockets elsewhere.

English Canada never troubled itself much with learning French.

Then, in 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pushed through the Official Languages Act. It declared French and English to be the official languages of Canada and obliged all federal institutions to provide services in both languages.

The law put bilingualism at a premium, particularly for federal jobs, and made the dual nature of Canadian society official.

Experiments with French immersion began in the 1960s. Programs blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s. Early fears that children’s English would suffer or that performance in other subjects would be affected have been allayed, for the most part.

“As an educational experiment, it’s a resounding success,” said Sharon Lapkin, a professor at the University of Toronto and researcher at the Modern Language Center of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

French immersion has its opponents, among them Hector Hammerly, a professor of linguistics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. This is how he describes the problem:

“It’s not really immersion. They are not surrounded by French-speakers. They are surrounded by 25 other children who speak French as badly as they do.”

Hammerly cited a study indicating that 52% of simple sentences written by immersion students had one or more errors in grammar or vocabulary.

“The immersion approach does not work and cannot work,” he said. “It forces children to communicate far beyond what they know. They make far more errors than a teacher can correct effectively.”

Lori Nash of Ottawa, head of a national group that favors a more traditional approach to learning French, said: “They can’t be taught, they can’t learn, and they can’t explore in a second language as well as in their mother tongue.”

Claims by others that the program is elitist bring a more mixed response.

“Is the system elitist?” Lapkin asked. “Yes. Should it be? No. Does it have to be? No. Are there places where it is less so? Yes.”

Pat Brehaut of Sherwood Park, Alberta, is president of Canadian Parents for French, one of the main organizations supporting French immersion. She agrees that immersion may have been elitist in the beginning, when many of the children came from better-educated families of the professional and managerial class.

“I think now if you look at children going into the program, you see a balance of abilities and a balance of socioeconomic backgrounds,” she said.

Demand continues to increase. In some parts of the country, parents line up to enroll their children in immersion programs.

“They are still waiting in Calgary, and there always have been waiting lists in Prince Edward Island,” Brehaut said.

“It has been growing since the day it started,” she said. “A year ago, CPF did a survey, and we found that 69% of English-speaking parents wanted their children to learn French.”

Even the most vocal proponents of the program acknowledge shortcomings.

According to Fortier, the federal languages commissioner, major problems include low participation at the secondary school level, teacher shortages, that the program does not work for all school districts and that immersion graduates do not have real fluency.

How the success is evaluated depends on goals and definitions.

Merrill Swain, head of the Modern Language Center, said the goals are to develop language skills better than those achieved by traditional French classes with no loss of mother-tongue proficiency and no loss in general academic achievement.

She said immersion had achieved those goals.

Does bilingualism mean speaking perfect French or just the ability to communicate effectively?

“You can’t expect an Anglophone child to become a Francophone,” said Marie-Antoinette Mantione, assistant coordinator for French as a second language at the Toronto Board of Education.

Children working in totally English environments cannot be expected to become speakers of perfect French, but experts agree that the major achievement is “functionally bilingual” children who are able to communicate and be at ease when speaking French.

Swain said immersion is probably the most studied program in the history of education. Surveys have shown that there is no long-term detrimental effect on the students’ English, academic achievement is comparable to students taught in English, and students acquire a high level of confidence in their ability to handle French.

Another benefit is that the young English Canadians have a better understanding of their French-speaking compatriots from Quebec and elsewhere.

“These kids can speak French with an ease that is way beyond what could be done in a traditional program 20 years ago,” said Roy Harvey, principal of Lawrence Park. “What has that contributed to a general understanding and tolerance in this country? I would say a lot.”