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HomeMy WebLinkAbout10a Delegation Carol Milstone re Early and Middle French Immersion ProgramsI. RECEIVED IN C0R PVC PATE RECORDS MAR I� e98f 6,ing speech is scheduled for presentation at the Ottawa - )istrict School Board, Monday, March 23, 1998, at 8 p.m.: 110-5- erstand that you have a daunting task ahead of you in -b- terms, of I evaluating all school board programs during these financially troubling times. I am here tonight to express my concerns about the early french immersion (EFI) program, by which I also mean middle immersion. I have gathered my research as a social psychologist and writer, but I am speaking to you now as a parent and community member. When you review the FI program, I anticipate that proponents of EFI will focus on its benefits by citing testimonials from its bilingual graduates and the extra funding from the federal government. I ask that you also give due consideration to the many costs associated with EFI. Research has documented psychological costs associated with EFI. While some children thrive in an EFI classroom, others are tired, frustrated, and even angry that their daily interactions cannot flow in the language of their mother tongue. Ottawa psychologist Sandra Burns, who specializes in educational issues and counsels many EFI parents, has publically expressed concern for the children in EFI who shouldn't be there: "[T]hese kids are crying themselves to sleep at night, or throwing tantrums when they get home, or acting out in different ways ... When parents insist on keeping these children in french immersion, the experience can be devastating ". Children who start in EFI but later transfer to the English stream pay another psychological price. Across Canada, for every 100 children who start in EFI, approximately 60 will transfer out by grade 8. Once in high school, up to 82. of the remaining FI students switch to English. This leaves only 7 children out of every 100 original EFI students who will graduate from the program. Children who transfer out of FI are relieved to be joining the English stream. But they also feel the stigma which was attached to them by the parents and educators of the larger, pro- french immersion system. One educational researcher (who happens to be pro -FI) has published her concern about these children: 11[T]he negative emotional impact on children who might perceive a switch out of FI as a failure on their part greatly concerns parents and educators ". In extreme cases, children who transfer out of FI in the early grades must repeat a grade in order to catch up on missed learning. One American child psychologist equates the emotional trauma of failing a grade to losing a parent. This must be an exaggeration, but as a researcher and writer I have seen two young girls choking back tears as their mothers told me their stories of failure in the EFI system. These parents could not have foreseen their children's difficulties in EFI, yet these problems would not have occurred in the English program. .../2 Registered, # 98oz58 G-' There are also social costs to pay for EFI, costs which are not documented in the literature but which most parents of children are all too aware. In some communities elementary schools are designated as either "all immersion" or "all english ". This means that children from the same neighborhood, and sometimes even the same family, are sent to different schools. In duel -track schools (offering both FI and English), the children are still divided, although the boundaries are more social than physical. These boundaries exist in the gym during assemblies, in the hallways between classes, and out on the playgrounds where each side has their own snow forts and their own turfs for soccer, hockey, pogs, or skipping rope. At such a young age the EFI system has created what social psychologists call "in groups" and "out groups ", or "us vs. them ". The statistics on children belonging to the two different sides present a darker side to EFI. Non - english speaking immigrant children do not generally participate in early french immersion. This fact denies the FI children vital opportunities to develop friendships across diverse languages and cultures. It also means that ESL children are unduly concentrated in the english stream, straining the classrooms and denying optimal learning opportunities for the students. What is the solution for parents and school boards who want to- spare the costs of EFI yet also want to retain french immersion? Late french immersion. Late immersion begins in grade seven, a point in a child's development when aptitude and motivation for learning a second language can be better determined. Children in late FI are generally there because they want to be -- and any parent of an adolescent knows that wild horses couldn't force it any other way. A well -kept secret in the lucrative early immersion system is that late immersion produces levels of proficiency similar to levels produced by early immersion. Previous school board trustees knew this, which is why all high school immersion students are taught together -- whether they started in early or late immersion. EFI was built on big dreams, and it is fuelled by big government, big financial incentives, and big votes. It is time now to humble ourselves to act in the interests of the littlest players in this game -- our children. I respectfully call on our newly elected school board to phase out french immersion from our elementary school system. Carol Milstone, Ph.D Phone: (613) 841 -7979 The Editor at Large kept a mental file on every wrong predic- tion ever made by a Canadian economist. "The realities of life," he gloats, "are quickly forgotten in all the theories." Further to that point, Chriden has taken a run or two at Pierre Trudeau, mocking his predecessor's intensely rational style. "If you used the word `planning' in front of Tru- deau in the morning, you had his attention for the rest of the day." He is also pleased to note that Trudeau, despite his ferocious will, leaned heavily, through the years, on min- isters such as Chr6tien who quietly "ran a good shop and didn't create any problems." That last line can be taken as a dear in- dication that none of the more activist min- isters in Chretien's cabinet will be allowed to break from the pack and deliver on the Liberals' campaign promise of fundamental change. The PM will be a wet blanket over the lii es of Allan Rode, Paul Martin, Lloyd Axworthy, and Roy MacLaren. He's al- ready told them, "Make a mistake — a big one — and you're gone." Delivering the same message in more positive tones, he praises rookie minister Art Eggleton because he was "twelve years mayor of Toronto and he's never been in trouble." It all adds up to four more years of gov- emment that parks rather than drives issues, government that sleeps with its eyes open. Even if Chretien is eventually left with no choice but to talk about separatism or the deficit he'll never stoop to bold or otherwise reckless proposals. His will be the most in- sipid administration Canada has ever seen — so magnificently uninspired it will send him swaggering home at the end of each day. Tomorrow there will be nothing. And it may work for him. Chretien may be right that a high voter turnout in the last election and his high approval rating (now seventy per cent) are proof that peo- ple are not so disgusted with Ottawa as they've been telling pollsters. A deter- mined inoffensiveness is bound to strike Canadians as something novel and wel- come in a politician. More likely, though, Chriden is well re- garded because he's competing in one of the weakest fields of political leaders we've ever seen, and because he's not Brian Mulroney. (British prime minister John Major was also treated to a long honeymoon just for replacing Margaret Thatcher.) As soon as a credible voice emerges to remind voters they asked for change, to articulate their as- pirations and reveal new realms of possibil- ity, the Liberals will frustrate like traffic. And it's inevitable such a voice will emerge: Politics abhors a vacuum. 1,$ c, .- ta% Xilhr ee9,•me., 1994 E d U C a t i 0 n False Dos d dos, skip, skip; faced face, skip, skip prends ks mains.... Four pigtails bob in unison as seven-year-old Kelly and Ashley skip rope to their "faaaa- vourite "song. The girls, both anglo- phones, learned the song at school, but not in a typical French class. Kelly and Ashley were recently grade -one classmates in a French- immersion school, along with most of their age group in Orleans, Ontario. When asked if_they had liked learning in French all day, they reply in unison, as if continuing their skipping song: "Yes, we like to learn French. It's fun!" There are roughly 300,000 stu- dents enrolled in French immersion across Canada, but nowhere is im- mersion more entrenched than in the sprawling bilingual Ot- tawa suburb of Orleans L� (aka. Orleans, but that's another story). Home to many bilingual fed lz�x oral public servants and 6� their families, Orleans could be considered the national bastion of French- immer- sion education. Here, for instance, the publicly funded Catholic school board offers only a French-immer- sion kindergarten, leaving parents who want an all- English programme for their children out of luck. In Or- leans, the bilingual dream is alive and thriving. Now in grade two, Kelly is living the dream. Her mother, Laureen Fish- er, reports that Kelly is happy and excelling in her French- immersion programme: Fisher is proud of her daughter's success, and believes that the extra time she and her husband spend at home playing educational games and doing language exercises with their daughter is partly responsi- ble for Kelly's progress. As a prescrip- tion to other parents, Fisher advises: "You have to spend the extra time ' by Carol MiIstone with them, which you don't have to do in the English programme." If Kelly is the measuring stick, then Ashley hasn't been able to make the grade. Like the Fishers, Della and Alex Urquhart have spent countless fatigue -driven evenings helping their daughter with her school work Even so, Ashley had trouble understand- ing French and learning to read and write. At the start of grade two she faced even greater academic difficul- ties, and finally was sent bade to grade one in the English programme to ac- quire the basic skills. Since English wasn't offered in her own school, Ash- ley had to be transferred, losing the, daily contact with her friends. "I was near tears," says Della Urquhart. "We were heartbroken. We thought,`This can't be righe' We know she's bright." As an unwelcome by- product of French immersion, the English pro- grammes in the Ottawa area have become catch -alls for students deemed not academically adept. Indeed, Ash- ley's new school is less than ideal: because of the high concentration of students who have behavioural or learning difficulties, the school lacks both the resources and the time to adequately help her catch up to her grade -two peers. The dark side of French immer- sion in Orleans is that Ashley's situa- tion is not unique: twenty per cent of the clients under the age of ten at the local Sylvan Learning Centre, a pri- vate tutoring service, are fallouts from the programme. "I would be really happy, "says Della Urquhart, "if they just cancelled French immersion al- together." The strange thing is that, even though there are lots of Orleans parents whose children haven't made it, Della's words fall on deaf ears. When the Urquharts chose French immersion for Ashley they thought they were doing the enlightened thing. The local word of mouth on W1 Johnny may end up bilingual but his second language could well be Frenglish, and he might ' also learn to hate school. What its promoters aren't saying about French immersion !'D Cn FI was pretry good, and the parents' information nights sponsored by the school board didn't mention a down- side. Also, most parents had no way of knowing that the brochures dis- tributed by the school board were closer to propaganda for the bilingual cause than to an objective laying out of the pros and cons of immersion as a way to teach a second language. The pamphlet put out by the Carleton Board of Education, which serves the Orleans area, is typical of the unqualified hype surrounding French immersion: "Early immersion capitalizes on a child's inherent incli- nation to learn languages.... By grade six, their listening and reading com- prehension in French is comparable to that of native francophone children." How would a parent unprepared to conduct research in the linguistics field know that those statements re- flect only one side in a heated aca- demic debate on FI's effectiveness? In Orleans, one mother did go be- yond the positive front on French immersion. A scientific researcher by profession, Lori Nash simply won- dered whether the school board's claims for the benefits of immersion were overzealous. Digging through ► illustrations: Roxaaa■ 61kadorotf' e n�ql Q -15 an academic consensus that FI graduates n When immersion students were speak French in a rapid and confident man- ner, his own research along with thatofoth- uizzed on what their teacher meant ers has revealed startling concerns over the A quality of the French so confidently spoken. n when In his book French Immersion: Myths she pointed to the window and C and Reality (1989), Hammerly describes asked, "Quel temps fait-Zl ! 113, ) most French immersion as a movement founded on_a false assumption: that people learn a 6 answered, " Look out the :R indow" second language in the same manner as they learned their first. They don't, Ham - merly argues. When people learn a second the academic literature, she started detect- ganization seems to have the authority language, they already have a first language ing some "bugs" in the FI system. Mixed in to review academic work. At least two — with its own syntax or rules for putting with the more positive results were dozens Ottawa -area doctoral students who ap- sentences together — stored in their heads. of reputable studies that associated im- proached the Carleton Board of Educa- "Immersed" in a classroom where they are mersion with high attrition rates and emo- tion with academically approved research supposed to "pick up" the second language tional distress among dropouts. As well, projects on French immersion were asked the way they did the first, students tend to FI seemed to be contraindicated for learn- to present their research plans to CPF be- plug the new language into the English ing - disabled students; the deeply flawed fore proceeding with their studies. structures they already know. In the case of French of some of its graduates was strong The organization has had close ties to French immersion, the result can be fluen- evidence that it was plagued by linguistic government since its founding in 1977, ry not in French but in Frenglish, an error - failures; and there were well- documented, when thirty -five parents were invited by ridden form of French that combines En- alternative methods of teaching a second Canada's first Commissioner of Official glish rules and French vocabulary. language to children. Languages, Keith Spicer, to attend what Hammerly and a fiancophone colleague, "The whole picture was not there in the he called a Parents' Conference on French Michelin Pellerin, analysed oral transcripts public debate on FI," says Nash. "I thought and Exchange Opportunities. CPF receives of senior French- immersion students cov- it was unfair that parents were being told its operational funding — $800,000 a year ering a broad range of linguistic proficien- things that were not true." In a series of at- — from the federal Department of Cana- ties. The problem areas were verb tenses tides Nash wrote for the Orleans commu- dian Heritage (formerly the Office of the and conjugations, vocabulary, the use of nity newspaper, The Star, from 1988 to Secretary of State), whose objective is to prepositions, and syntax. On average, fifty - 1991, she brought her findings to light encourage the dissemination of infor- four per cent of each student's sentences only to face vitriolic criticism from propo- mation on the teaching and learning of were seriously flawed. nents of French immersion. Letters to the English and French as second languages. In a study published in The Canadian editor implied that she was anti - French. Spawned by official bilingualism, CPF soon Modern Language Review in 1976, Irene "You can't believe what my family went turned French immersion into a sacred Spilka, a researcher who analysed the oral through every time an article came out," cow, resisting all research that challenged sentences of grade -six students in the orig Nash says. "The worst pan was the mali- its doctrines. inal St Lambert French - immersion pro - cious phone calls from strangers." Harder Key critical academic studies on French gramme in Montreal, found that more still, Nash's columns had no impact on immersion that have been published in than half of their utterances contained er- the way the local school board presented peer - reviewed academic journals are con- rors, compared to only six per cent of the French immersion to parents. spicuously ignored in the promotional lit- sentences of grade -six francophones.While As well as the local board, Nash found erature from CPF, proniitient FI school the francophones' errors were "unsystem - that she had taken on a powerful national boards, and Canada's Office'of the Com- atic" (probably caused by inattention), the lobby group called Canadian Parents for missioner of Official Lan- : `'. ,' ,? immersion students' errors French (CPF). In fact, many of the school guages. For instance, the, . came from imposing En- brochures and handbooks to which Nash only time Hector Ham -, glish- language structures on objected were produced and sold by CPF, merly's research is men w eta jyafeft — French expressions. More re- which promotes French - language training, tioned in CPF's twenty Lii3e41a ("`% eendy, a pro-FI research team and French immersion in particular, with five -page listing of reading who analysed the speaking zeal. Its active members are typically an- material on French im- skills of Ottawa -area immer- glophone parents from professional back- mersion is in a 1983 article. sion graduates was forced to grounds; some are also school -board trust by Lionel Daneault called "The Little conclude "the range of vocabulary and level ees. In its brochures, CPF proudly states, Butcher [meaning Hammerly] Meets the of accuracy of these graduates of FI are "Where French programs have increased, Sacred Cow." well below native - speaker performance." chances are... CPF was involved." Hammerly is an applied linguist at Sim- Many FI educators are using the term With 200 chapters across Canada, on Fraser University who has published "fossilization" to describe the apparent in- 18,000 members, and 300 affiliated or- five books and thirty-five academic arti- transigence of Frenglish. French- immer- ganizations, what CPF has to say about ties on various aspens of second- language sion students are both extremely confi- French immersion approaches gospel. It teaching and learning, and he has been dent in their French communication and also has a hand in making the gospel: critical of French immersion for more than extremely resistant to correction. Why? though it is a parent -based lobby, the or- a decade. He points out that, while there is Hammerly explains FI's failure in part ► 14 S.turdav Night, september1996 6f False Immerslon by noting that "immersion" programmes in Canadian schools do anything but im- merse the child in French, since there is only one francophone — the teacher, who some- times isn't even a native French speaker — operating in an "interactive, conversational milieu" of twenty -five anglophones. True immersion would reverse those numbers, although this is clearly not an economical form of second - language training. Hammerly, among other linguists, also disputes another sacred tenet of French im- mersion — that younger children necessar- ily learn a second language faster than adults: "The ability to remember and in- ternalize riles and vocabulary increases with age. Even the capacity to imitate and pro- duce sentences increases up to the age of eighteen. Furthermore, the later the sru- dents start to study a second language, the fewer the errors in pronunciation." (This developmental perspective would account for the findings of Sandra Weber and Claudette Tardif, both professors of educa- tion. When young FI students were quizzed on what their teacher meant every day when she pointed to the window and ask - ed,"Quel temps fait -il? , most of the kids thought it meant, "Look out the window. ") It could in fact be that much of the French - immersion school day is simply wasted. Research conducted by a French teacher, Mabel Tatto, in 1983, when she was a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, found no statistical difference in the grammar scores of grade -eleven sru- dents with twelve years of French immer- sion — about 5,300 hours — and those with 500 hours of core French (structured and systematic French classes), either in free composition or in written grammatical exercises. Another researcher, Christiane Hamm - Fleig, professor of French studies at Queen's University, found that if core French and French - immersion graduates took the same six -week French course in a f - ancophone environment they scored al- most equally in speaking skills. The FI graduates spoke more rapidly and confi- dently, but with less grammatical accuracy. Reading and comprehension skills are where French - immersion students are sup- posed to outclass those who receive other forms of French instruction. But doubts have been raised that FI students ever achieve native -like comprehension. Many FI graduates report that they can't follow French television or radio. A retired French- immersion teacher from the Glebe bilingu- al high - school programme in Ottawa says that her snrdents couldn't follow the French- language movies she showed in class. They could catch barely a word in a production of Moliere they saw at the National Arts Centre, and they often purchased English translations of the French books they were studying to use as learning aids. Though neither CPF nor French -im- mersion planners are receptive to Hector Hammerly's work, he's actually willing to point out a better way to achieve their ide- alistic bilingual aims. He says that superior levels of French proficiency can be achieved with far fewer hours of French - language training than received in French immer- sion. Specifically, 700 hours of structured, systematic French instruction to well-mo- tivated young adults at the Foreign Ser- vice Institute outside Washington produced higher levels of oral proficiency than 7,000 hours of French "immersion" to younger students. In his 1989 book, Hammerly takes four chapters to outline a systematic way _ to teach French to school -aged children; it would start in grade five with one to two hours of instruction daily, and increase in high school by adding various subjects taught in French. Reviews from FI advo- cates were at best hostile. The pro -FI bias that has plagued re- searchers such as Hammerly is no laugh- ing matter. Hammerly has been, in his own words, "repeatedly vilified" by French -im- mersion advocates and says that other scholars who have been critical of French immersion have had a hard time getting published. To show that the bias exists, Hammerly ordered a computer search on French immersion from the ERIC (Edu- cational Resources Information Center) Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguis- tics of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. Most reputable aca- demic research on educational issues begins with an ERIC search, but — even though they have Hammerly's work on file at the centre - he was not terribly surprised when the print -out failed to ate any of the studies critical of French immersion that he had ei- ther produced or referred to in his research. The director of the Center for Applied Lin- guistics at the time was Richard Tucker, who co-authored the 1972 "classic " — and definitely influential — book on French im- mersion, Bilingual Education of Cbil- dren. The St Lambert Experiment, based on a study of Montreal's pioneer programme. The most visible problem with French - immersion programmes, rarely mentioned in the school -board literature, is their high dropout rate. By the Carleton Board of Education's own conservative estimate, ► False Immersion twenty-one per cent of early FI students have dropped out of immersion by grad eight. In Carleton -board high schools, at- trition has been as high as eighty-two pe cent. Predictably, brochures from CPF al- lude only to the high - school attrition prob- lem and don't even mention dropout rates in the early grades, where students leaving the programme receive less help from the public - school system than many parents would like to see. Even Corrinne Wiss; an educational researcher who is pro- immer- sion, concedes that "the negative emotion- al impact on children who might perceive a switch out of French immersion as a fail- ure on their pan greatly concerns parents and educators." Sandra Burns, a prominent Ottawa -area child psychologist who specializes in edu- cational assessment, says "potential French- immersion dropouts " — children who are unhappy, or having academic difficulty, or both — make up a fair portion of her practice. She feels strongly that their needs are not being properly ad- dressed by the schools. "I frequently get comments from these students' teachers indicating that socially they are doing just fine," says Burns. "But these kids are crying themselves to sleep at night, or throwing tantrums when they get home, or acting out in different ways.... When parents insist on keeping these children in French immersion, the experience can be devastating." Wendy, a mother from Orleans who prefers not to give her last name, has a son who experienced difficulties in FI and was transferred to English at another school, leaving behind a sister who is thriving in French immersion. "I feel that there is a stigma with the children in the English programme, that they're seen as not as bright," saysWendy."When I mention that my son is in the English programme, other parents zero in, `Oh, does he have a prob- lem?' And I become very defensive." She and her husband also feel stress that "as parents we failed since our child cannot continue in FI. And yet we don't want to admit that we're failures. Some parents want their kids to go on in FI anyway." The stigma that Wendy mentions has also received its share of academic study, again outside the auspices of CPF. Paul Olson and George Burns, in an article called "Politics, Class, and Happenstance: French Immersion in a Canadian Con- text," argue that immersion programmes are elitist because they disproportionately serve parents of professional or managerial 18 S.irurdac ichr • aeotember -1794 background. Related studies consistently find that children from families with high- er socioeconomic status are overrepre- sented in immersion. programmes. As one r local teacher said, anonymously, in an ar- ticle in The Ottawa Citiwn,"We have what amounts to a quasi private - school system going on in the public - school system." It is no coincidence that children with stronger academic aptitude are also over- represented in French - immersion pro- grammes, while the English stream catch- es more students who are learning- disabled, "temperamentally challenged," or of a mi- nority language. The scandal is that financial resources are not sufficiently directed to the English programmes to handle these extra needs. It is the French - immersion classes, already the cram of the crop, that receive the large bonus funding through the feder- al government's Official Languages in Ed- ucation Program. In the 1993 -94 school year, the federal "bonus" contribution on top of regular provincial education funding was $152 for each elementary immersion student, compared to $9.72 for children taking forty min - utes of core French a day. Children taking no French received no fund - ing. Classes of thirty elementary FI s,tvr` students receive $4,500 more an- nually than similar English class- es; at the high - school level the discrepancy is $7,080. Not only does French immer- sion sap the best students from the larger system, it saps financial resources as well. As if to wash its hands of any responsi- bility for the two-tiered educational sys- tem created by French immersion, one CPF brochure promotes. its suitability for all children: "The language of instruction bears little, if any, rdation to academic per- formance ... the student who would have academic difficulties m an English program will likely experience those same difficul- ties in Immersion." But this claim flies in the face of the largest studies ever conduct- ed on children who are experiencing learn- ing difficulties in French immersion. Ron- ald Trites, a noted neuropsychologist who was working out of the university-affiliat- ed Royal Ottawa Hotel, conducted three mammoth studies that he later saw swept under the rug by Canada's pro-immer- sion players. In the first study, he oversaw assess - ments.of more than 4,000 learning -dis- abled children referred by local schools both before and following the introduction of French immersion to the Ottawa area in 1969. By 1973, Trites's results showed that early immersion, was .in'soare way causing a an increase in the number of students being referred for examination because of learning disabilities. Later his research team assessed a group of 200 early FI students who were followed through to grade four. Fifty -three per cent of the kids had left immersion by the end of grade four; another twenty per cent were experiencing considerable diffi- culty in immersion. The children were for the most pan average to bright in intelli- gence and had good English vocabularies, but poor reading skills in both French and English.Trites and his team concluded that not only were these children not picking up French but their development in reading and writing was stunted and learning dis- abilities were exacerbated by the French - immersion setting. Many had developed an intense dislike of the French language. Sometimes it takes a heaping of reality to topple a dream. Despite the education- al inequities created by the French- immer- sion system, despite its detrimental learn- ing and emotional effects on certain groups of students, and despite its graduates' faulty comprehension and speaking skills, French immersion remains a hallowed Canadian mission, always successful in the eyes of its adherents. Even Pierre Trudeau, in his fond reminiscences of official bilingualism, gloats over the "success" of French immer- sion in Canada. Still, longtime renegades such as Lori Nash, Ronald Trites, and Hector Ham - merly are slowly being joined by disen- chanted laypersons — parents such as the Urquharts, and others like Donald Bell, a former CPF true believer who was moved to make a submission to Ontario's recent Royal Commission on Learning. Pan of his address derailed his disillusionment•. "Bilin- gual myself, I was actively involved in CPF and pressed hard for expansion of immer- sion programs. I dismissed as `red - necks' A those who objected to these programs, no matter how well - reasoned their con- cerns may have been. More recently, how- ever, I have experienced many of those very concerns in my own sons' elemen- tary school, and have come to regret my previous enthusiasm." Back in Orleans, Kelly is still happy; Ashley is not; and most parents still turn a deaf ear. A baby may cry after a vaccina- tion needle, but parents ignore such cries because they're sure the pain is for the child's own good. The trouble is that when it comes to French immersion parental faith has been shaped by false hopes, false promises, and false illusions — all fuelled by the government of Canada's bilingual dream machine.