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To complete the interview component, I spoke to a close friend who teaches French Immersion at a middle school in Port Moody, BC, a short distance outside the Vancouver metro area. What follows is a brief synopsis of her perspectives. My questions were primarily about the state of the French program in her school, the difficulties that she faces, what has been successful in motivating students, and the level of French competency that is achieved.

The State of the French Program

French is not a popular language in British Columbia. Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken more than even English and Korean, Japanese, and other eastern languages are in high demand in schools, while French is mandated by Canadian laws and not by the request of the students or their parents. Universities on the west coast have weak training programs in French but with incredibly high entrance requirements, providing a distinct shortage in qualified teachers for immersion programs. This leads to a degradation in the quality of programs as unqualified teachers take unfillable positions and, as the quality drops, demand for immersion as the answer to gifted challenge problems drops sharply. As such, the state of the French program is distinctly in question, at least in the Vancouver area. There is relatively minimal demand and it is difficult to run an expensive and complex educational subprogram without the support of the community or even the school administration, who tends to imply that resources could be better put to use in many other areas than teaching students a language that they feel is not useful unless the students leave the province. That being said, the more heavily funded schools, such as this one, are able to hire the top graduates of French education programs and provide a better quality of teaching to students in immersion than other schools provide in their English-language streams, giving parents a reason to choose immersion as an option for increased educational efficiency. The program in this school is one of the few growing immersion programs in the province and its success is mostly based on the added challenge for students and the resulting demand from parents to improve.

Difficulties in French Immersion

There are tyo types of obvious difficulties – the students’ difficulties and the administrative problems. As above, the administrative problems are that the administration, not just at this school but across the province, believes that French immersion education is the result of government mandating and not any inherent benefit. They are confident that second-language learning is extremely useful for students but they believe that another second language would be more beneficial – most settle on either Mandarin or Japanese as their immersion language of preference, especially since there is a much larger pool of Mandarin and Japanese qualified subject-area teachers available. This tends to result in funding being cut to the absolute minimum for French resources and a consolidation of immersion programs into schools that tend not to have good reputations in the community. French immersion programs in Vancouver are concentrated in the inner city schools that lack other programs for advanced students and the parents must then decide whether second-language or advanced programs are more of benefit to their children. From a student perspective, the challenge is not learning the language, it is being motivated to practice. Unlike school in the east of the country, where students are eager to use their French whenever possible, both in class and outside of class, west-coast students feel that their French skills make them appear “nerdy” and that the language is useless to them as anything more than an academic interest, causing a massive lack of motivation to practice. Students study hard to achieve their French skills. But they don’t want to speak to other students in French or participate in French culture within the province, outside of their school circles. This leads to stilted speech and a lack of interest in recreational French reading and conversation. They are more than capable but the effort that is put into studying is not present in conversational mastery.

Motivational Successes

There seem to be two approaches that work for motivation – escape and containment. From an escape perspective, there is minimal French usage in British Columbia. As a result, taking students early in their immersion programs (at least, early in the adolescent phase of their immersion programs, in the case of early-immersion students) to French cultural centers, including Quebec City or Ottawa, sometimes even Paris or Marseilles, solidifies a motivation that lasts far longer than the short trip and lights a flame inside the students for not simply educationally internalizing the language but using it in the way that they use English or their other daily spoken languages. On the other side of that coin is the containment approach. Creating an atmosphere where students may create a tight-knit group of French speakers within the school, across the boundaries of grade, makes a sense of community among French speakers that excludes those who feel that French is not useful. While this approach may seem to go against what is desired in the whole-school community approach that is proposed by the BCCT, it seems to function well within the constraints of a curriculum that many feel outdated and useless to give students a sense of community within community and a motivation to use their new language skills.

Competency in French

There is a wide spectrum of possible levels of French competency but it tends to be bipolar in its actual results – students either speak French marginally without an ability to communicate effectively beyond a dictionary-in-hand approach or they speak fluent French with complete comfort. This seems to be linked to the level of motivation achieved. Highly motivated students spend high school practicing, developing fluency, and feeling comfortable about their French. Unmotivated students learn French in the way that other students learn about Canadian history – a subject in a textbook but not a living culture in which to be comfortable. While this polarization is sad at many levels, at least there is a significant portion of students who, if properly motivated in the middle-school grades, succeed beyond expectations.