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Notes -
The top 10 or 20 percent get very good, but the average student never gets to the point where all that reading pays off because they resist the earlier drudgery and therefore can’t understand the readings.
Math and science are the first subjects to be dropped from the French program because students tell their parents that their crappy marks are because it’s all in French (untrue since most words are the same: triangle, fraction, oxygen, mitochondria, energy, every word that ends in -ation, etc).
It’s so bad that, at a meeting of the hardest-core French teachers in my province, I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along” with the teacher, which means “zone out with the book open.” This was because, after 12 years, even the teachers didn’t expect the kids to understand literary French. Note that we’re talking stuff like Camus, which is stylistically similar to Hemingway- not linguistically taxing. You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing. It works like that until about grade 6, at which point students are celebrated if the hit A2 proficiency. You would expect an adult to hit A2 after 300 hours of study, which is 60 five-hour days. There are nearly 1200 days total in grades 1 to 6. The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.
That's deranged...
Shout my name when the angry mobs come for the teachers, I'll try to tell everyone you were one of the good ones.
What? No....
Well, depending on what you mean by the former, I might agree. Children don't learn just by passively absorbing things spoken in their environment. They figure it out because it lets them get what they want from their parents, interact with their peers, etc. Every such activity is an exercise, that's how they get better at it. Later, when they go to school, they're forced to exercise even more, by reading, writing, and interacting with the teacher and each other.
When you tell me there's an "French immersion school", I assume this is a school that forces all the school activities to be done in French (minus, maybe, student interactions). An "immersion school" that doesn't make you do that defeats the purpose!
And if you're wondering what's the difference between what I consider immersion, and just studying a language, it's that you don't try to teach people by taking the language apart, feeding them it's rules, and hoping they'll be able to reconstruct it from that, you force them to do stuff using thr language, correct any mistakes they make, and otherwise make them figure it out on their own.
The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing, minus English class and a day off now and then for the science fair or pride parade. End result: 60 hours of study in 6 years.
And it’s not just one bad school or province. It is a national issue in Canada. Every year there is a teapot tempest about how ineffective this is, but we keep doing it (the political reasons are long-dead by now).
I'm definitely not picturing students being able to "read along" with the teacher. I can believe this is a national issue, I just don't think it's an issue with the methodology as much as it is a simple case of low standards.
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