Justin Trudeau caused quite a stir last week when he mused about making all public schools bilingual. I must admit that it really was pretty reckless on his part. I mean, what better way to ignite a fire in French Quebec than to give the impression of wanting to diminish the French language.
But you know, I actually like the idea. To be honest, I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I mean, we’ve been trying for ages to bridge the gap between French Quebec and English Canada, so this may just be the miracle solution (though I doubt it).
I understand why Francophones would want to keep things as they are. It’s already such a struggle to keep French alive in North-America that one can understand their desire of having unilingual schools. But as far as I’m concerned, with languages, one doesn’t exclude the other.
I don’t have to look further than myself for an example. I was brought up in both French and English, meaning that I split my time between the two languages. One could therefore conclude that I am now less fluent in either language than unilinguals, but this is simply not the case. Actually, whatever I learn in one language seems to be automatically duplicated in the other.
Here’s another way of putting it: Imagine that a brain were a computer. Every new language learnt would become a folder, in which memory containing words, expressions and cultural knowledge would be stored. Well, I am convinced that all children have a program which allows them to effortlessly duplicate any new saved file into all other language folders. In other words, when they would save the file info.doc into the folder C/language1, it would automatically get copied into the folder and C/language2/.
The result: children learnt their language at a normal pace, except that they end up with two!
Now, I don’t know if this concept of bilingual schools could ever be successfully implemented -sorry, but it really would be hard to find a proper French teacher in
No comments:
Post a Comment