Captain Jelly Belly officially enters the public school system in September, starting in Junior Kindergarten. Although JK is in English, French Immersion begins in Senior Kindergarten, so we’re already trying to decide what we are going to do about that. It’s turning out to be a very hard decision, and even though we have several months to think it over, it will probably take us that long — at least — to figure out what to do.
On the pro side, our kids would get to learn a language when their brains are flexible enough to easily absorb it, and some studies have shown that learning a second language as a child makes you a better problem solver and creative thinker later in life. Since our country is bilingual, knowing French will help you in the workforce, either working for the government or any other position that involves dealing with the public. Most of our friends are putting their kids in French Immersion, so the Captain will be able to stay with the kids he already knows.
On the more abstract side, it appears that the existence of French Immersion — which is very prevalent in Ottawa, in that practically every public school has a program — has created two “streams” of students. Teachers advise parents on who will and won’t do well in FI, and usually, they recommend that kids with good language skills and who are quick learners go into the FI program. As a result, the “smart” kids are heading into FI — FI kids consistently have better test scores than the English streamers — while “problem” kids or kids with learning or social problems are streamed into the English program. And so, even though we are not sold on FI, since the Captain is clearly quite clever, we want him to be in the “smart kid” stream, don’t we? Ironically, detractors of immersion often cite this situation as “elitism,” and use it as an argument to eliminate FI altogether. But since I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe we should take advantage of the more “advanced” stream that is being created, and put our son in that.
On the con side, though, is that the first few years are going to be really hard. There’s no doubt that FI kids lag behind English stream kids in terms of English comprehension and vocabulary for at least the first three or four years, and their skills in other subjects are also behind, as the focus is on learning the language, not the math/history/spelling basics. Apparently, the FI kids will “catch up” by grade 5 or 6, but you have to be pretty damn committed to the program to watch your kid strugging with reading in grade 4 and not think that something is wrong. Also on the con side is that the French that is taught in FI is “official” French, meaning from the dictionary — slang is not covered. Since we don’t speak any French at home, there is plenty of evidence that by the time CJB reaches grade 8, he’ll be “school fluent” — able to translate his English thoughts directly into French — but actually unable to carry on a real conversation with natural French-speakers. Anecdotes on the internet from people who have been through FI say that they find it easier, in Quebec or even France, to just find an English-speaking person, than to try to struggle through their French phrasing. So, what is the point of FI then?
And another con, which is big for me personally, is that FI kids often have trouble writing in English. Although their reading and speaking skills in English will catch up, eventually, their writing skills, particularly advanced grammar and spelling, will always suffer. I value my writing skills highly, and in today’s internet world, where kids are already using “l8r” and other such crap to communicate, I can’t imagine what kind of illiterate goon we might produce if he goes through the FI stream.
And lastly, I read an interesting article online written by a woman who had started her son in FI, but then pulled him out around grade 4. Her reasoning was that he had lost his love of learning. His whole school career was focussed on learning the mechanics of the language; his natural curiousity in the subjects themselves had disappeared. Whereas he used to be into art and math and reading, instead, he now was completely geared towards just learning to talk. He couldn’t ask questions about his favourite subjects because he didn’t have the vocabulary; he couldn’t enjoy his classes because part of the time, he just didn’t understand. Sure, that would all “work out eventually,” but by then, maybe his ability to think of school as a fun place of happy learning would have disappeared.
One option is to put our kids in “late” French Immersion, which starts in grade 4, instead of in Kindergarten. Apparently, this will give them time to cement their English skills a bit better, but also start them early enough that they can become fluent in French. But one major drawback for us for this case is that our local school only offers FI starting in Kindergarten. If you want late FI, you have to switch schools, and by the time he’s in grade 4, I can’t see CJB wanting to leave all his friends for a new place where they don’t even speak his language. So it looks like it’s SK or nothing, for us.
Anyway, I wanted to get some of my thoughts on this down while we were thinking about it, and I also wanted to invite anyone out there with an opinion to weigh in. I think is slightly pro-FI, and I am more than slightly against-FI, so if anyone out there went through it, or knows someone who went through it, or knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who went through it, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
TurtleHead 
Some random thoughts:
1. I think it’s very important to learn French if you’re living in Ottawa. That said, I think if I had lived here while growing up, the amount of French I took in school would have been enough to get by.
2. Not sure where you read about FI kids not being able to speak French to locals because of the “school French” vs. slang French, but I have enough French friends to know that that is complete hogwash. You can also ask a native to slow down or to speak “Parisian French”, and there aren’t so many vocab differences that you can’t understand each other.
3. You guys do an excellent job of exposing your kids to literature at home, so if your kids do FI you might consider doing some English spelling and grammar at home. I’m sure there are lots of fun computer games or activity books that would encourage them to learn that stuff. However, I have talked with some former FI people, and they do agree that their English grammar skills are crap.
4. I’m on the fence about the whole “smart kids in FI, problem kids not in FI” trend. On one hand, I wonder if the kids recognize this separation and even if they did, would they care? I mean, I’m not sure a kid in English-only would assume he’s a problem kid. I realise that the bigger issue is the kids he’d be exposed to if he’s in English-only. And that’s definitely a valid issue.
I can understand your indecision. Given all of that information, I’d be hard-pressed to come to a conclusion, too. Too bad the “late FI” option wouldn’t work out. It seems like a happy medium, but I agree that the move to a new school is a strike against it.
If I strip it down, it seems to be a decision between these two choices:
a. be completely bilingual by age 18 but struggle to write well in English
b. be able to focus on school for school’s sake without the extra effort of learning in another language on top and learn a little French along the way
My sisters and I all did French Immersion from kindergarten all the way through public school. I stopped taking French of any kind after Grade 10, and my one sister did it all the way through to OAC.
I’d say the results for us were each pretty similar; doing French Immersion had next to no impact on our learning ability. It didn’t affect our performance in other subjects. It had no impact on what subjects we were good at, and what subjects we were bad at. It had no impact on our marks. I was good at math/science, and my sister was good at the humanities. That would probably have been the case no matter what.
By the time I graduated high school, I don’t believe that I was any smarter or any dumber than I would have been if I hadn’t done French Immersion. I don’t think doing it affected my ability to write in English in the long run. And I think I would have pursued the same fields after highschool regardless.
The *only* thing that is different – is I can speak french now. I can’t write it at all, and I probably couldn’t read an adult novel in French very quickly without a dictionary close by. But that’s because I haven’t kept it up. However – when I went travelling in Europe, in France and Belgium and Switzerland, I could understand the people there, and I could make myself understood. In Paris the accent is a bit thick, but once I was immersed in it for a week, I was almost fluent.
And I actually take pride in that. I like that, as a Canadian, I can understand french, and that I could pick it up again after a few weeks. I definitely don’t agree with the people who claim that you can’t actually carry on a conversation with real french people. That’s not been my experience. And it’s certainly not a useful “pro” argument; non-FI students won’t be able to carry on a conversation in french at all.
I also think there are subtler benefits; French is a romance language that’s much closer to Latin than English is, and when you know what the french version of a word is, it can actually help you with english comprehension. For example, the word “souvenir” in french is a verb that means “to remember”. Helps you understand why we call those things souvenirs :). Sometimes when I don’t know what a word means in english, I can take a good guess based on the root – even if the word derives from italian or spanish.
As for difficulties, there were minor issues we all faced while we were in grade school. Our english spelling suffered because we were learning french at the same time – we would constantly mispell words like “liter” as “litre”. And in math class, they had differeny syntaxes for numbers and arithmetic. But those things just worked themselves out. I value spelling in writing, but as a measure of how clever someone is, I think it’s fairly low on the totem pole.
So overall, I would recommend French Immersion. Perhaps it affected me in ways I don’t know, but I think that if nothing else, I have the ability to travel in many parts of the world, or our own country, and communicate. That’s the reason to do it, in the end, not anything else.
Thanks a lot, Nick, that was really valuable. Were you in 100% FI, or was it just for some subjects? Also, do your parents speak French?
This was at the Kitchener-Waterloo Bilingual School in Waterloo. Basically it was 100% French for half the day and then English for the remaining part of the day. But there didn’t seem to be any connection between language and subject. I remember in grade 7, I had math class in both french and english, but science was all french. It more depended on what the teacher’s expertise was.
My parents don’t speak french. They both had canadian highschool-level, non-immersion french, so they had a rudimentary understanding, but my sister and I were often able to talk in french and they couldn’t understand us. It came in handy sometimes, because they would sit there looking proud while we were talking about misbehaving :).
My sister kept it up much more than I did, and even got some co-op jobs in university that required her to be bilingual – one phone support job, and another at the government. She used to get snooty remarks from the Quebecers occationally (“Elle a une accent mauvaise anglais!”) but they could always understand her.