Alberta: Quel Dommage! Second-Language Courses Should Not Be Optional

[TESL Network Canada]

Canada: Quel dommage!

Second-language courses should not be optional

The Calgary Board of Education has made a faux pas with its curious
new French policy. The board, arguing weakly that this is about choice
and has nothing to do with the district's recent budget crisis, is
making French optional in elementary and junior high schools.

Starting in September, it will be up to elementary schools to decide
whether they want to offer a second language to children in Grades 4
to 6. Administrators are supposed to make such a decision in
consultation with teachers and parents, but once the course is chopped
from the curriculum, good luck getting it reinstated down the road,
when future children start school and their parents want them to learn
French.

For now, junior high schools still have to offer the second language
in Grades 7 to 9, but as an elective. If students attend an elementary
school that doesn't offer French, they will have less incentive to
start learning a new language in junior high, and it is likely only a
matter of time before those schools argue for the same flexibility as
is being given to elementary schools.

The decision, despite how the board is dressing it up, gives parents
less choice when it comes to exposing their children to a second
language. It also goes against the spirit of the province's mandated
second languages policy, which was passed after the exhaustive
Learning Commission review in 2003, but never made mandatory because
the rural school boards argued they didn't have enough resources to
implement it. "It was put in abeyance because it was felt that school
boards weren't in a position to actually accomplish it," said Alberta
Education Minister Dave Hancock.

The policy clearly articulates the province's language goals, stating:
"all Alberta students in Grades 4 to 9 will study a second language
under Alberta's new Languages Initiative . . . By the time the
initiative is fully underway in 2011-12, all students in Grades 4 to 9
will be required to study a second language."

Ironically, the CBE was one of the districts that led by example by
embracing the policy and implementing it for the past five years,
making the second language program mandatory for students in Grades 4
to 9.

This reversal puts Calgary students at a significant disadvantage
compared with those who are exposed to multiple languages. Research
clearly shows that students who are fluent in two languages have
greater intellectual potential, score higher in both verbal and
non-verbal intelligence and test better in reading, language and math.
A second language also significantly improves first language skills,
leads to superior cross-cultural skills and the ability to adapt
better to situations outside of one's comfort zone or in varying
cultural contexts.

Multiple languages keep us competitive on a global scale, but also
across the country. British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, P.E.I., and
Nova Scotia all require some degree of compulsory second language
education for students starting as early as Grade 1 and going all the
way up to graduation, in some provinces.

Alberta risks being left behind. Hancock says he wants to revisit the
province's language policy and think about making it a requirement of
graduation. That can't happen soon enough for today's children who
face a closed-door approach to French under the CBE's disappointing
reversal on language education.

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Quel+dommage/4749634/story.html#ixzz1LxMdnIL8