My five year old granddaughter corrects my French.  Carefully, patiently, frequently.  ‘No, Grama, it’s *burrrr*’ she says, doing that impossible Francophone thing with her tongue that makes the word sound like a cat’s purr.  ‘Br?’ ‘Burrrr, BuRRRRR!  Say it again, Grama.’  Sometimes she sighs and gives it up as a lost cause.  At other times she gets stubborn and we pat the word back and forth like ping pong champions until she is satisfied.  Until the next time, when I have forgotten how again.  And the huge brown eyes roll upward as she says to herself, ‘Elle a mis ma patience à bout’.

My generation of Canadians was taught French as a Second Language starting in Grade Nine for 40 minutes a day.  We memorized vocabulary and verb structures, wrote exercises and listened to recorded voices saying simple phrases that we repeated in unison. If we weren’t doing well at it, we were allowed to substitute Latin for our second language.  Or drop it altogether.  Or never bother, if we were in a secretarial or industrial arts stream. This program taught me to read French fairly well with the aid of a dictionary, understand some slowly spoken French and get frustrated by anyone speaking it conversationally.  I can say ‘Lentement, s’il vous plaît’* and ‘Encore une fois’** very well. My husband, another product of this program, got a lot of French training as an adult because he worked as a manager for the Federal Government.  He can understand talking heads on TV, but loses it in movies. His accent is worse than mine.

My daughters’ generation got FSL for 20/40 minutes per day starting in Kindergarten.  They learned songs and stories and numbers and had fun.  Some of them even learned a good bit of French that way. Parents who were serious about the kid learning French could opt for Early French Immersion, starting at Kindergarten or Grade One. My elder daughter did ‘Late Immersion’ with a year taught completely in French in Grade Six, followed by two bilingual years and ‘Enriched French’ at high school level. She came out of that with decent conversational French, good enough to let her work in the National Park system in French.  If you were a hard working, motivated student, this program worked out well. The YD, having watched elder sister slave away at the syntax and vocabulary, tore up the application form for this option and stayed with the 40 minute program all through high school, graduating with decent pronunciation and no grammar.  When she was hired by the Federal Government and had to be ‘Level Three’ bilingual, she spent months and years as an adult in French language training and she still needs to do revision.

These FSL choices are available to my granddaughter, but her parents chose a different route.  After bilingual daycare from eight months old, she graduated to a French Language school and an attached French Language daycare. Her French was mostly passive when she started junior Kindergarten (Maternelle) at age four, and she struggled for the first few months. (Big brown eyes awash with tears, she told her mother that she was afraid of getting things wrong because she did not understand.) However, she sopped up the language like the sponge children are designed to be at four and younger and is now level with her Francophone contemporaries and doing fine.  And terrorizing her grandparents and her parents, of course.

I fervently believe in the value of banging language, grammar and vocabulary into the heads of children from birth on up. Fluency in the milk tongue and a second language if possible, good reading and writing skills made accessible by fluency: these things are the recipe for success in whatever the growing child and adult decides to do. I would be happy to argue that Barak Obama is President today because his mother hauled him out of bed very early in the morning to give him extra English training. There are a lot of routes to language competence – I’m not specifically advocating for early rising or second language immersion or cue cards here. And I don’t expect everyone to end up as a language lover who plays games with words and lives to write. But language is a tool box.  The better the tools, the better the job the tool user can do.  Even more than the bike helmet and the rubber boots and the mouth guard and the vegetables, skill with language is a survival tool, enrichment and protection all in one.

In my granddaughter’s case, success in learning a second language well enough to fit in was a hard job but her success at it has made her a much more confident child. And certainly one who can teach her old grandmother new tricks.

by: Mary G.

Photo courtesy of eco-photography, used under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved