Cavesa wrote:Severine wrote:The message was clear across the board: we are teaching this to you because it's required, and that is the only reason. Don't worry about it.
And that is nothing against the situation they don't expect. If you actually "worry about it". You are not really supposed to succeed. And above all, you are not supposed to expect being given high quality education, high quality teaching. You are not supposed to question, why is the school system making your restart several times and lose several years of investment on both sides, or why is the school library French section nearly non-existent.
This point about low expectations is a good one. I have a vivid memory, from grade 9 (age 14), of our teacher mentioning that it was the last year French class was mandatory, and saying that he hoped that most of us would continue to study it for the rest of high school even though it was optional. One of my friends, who liked French, asked, "If we take it every year until graduation, will we be able to speak it fluently?" He responded with something like, "No, but it would prepare you to study it in university if you wanted to get a degree in French language and literature, and you would be fluent by the time you graduated university."
I remember thinking how insane it was that he was proposing we study a language, which we had already studied for 6 years, for an additional 3-4 years, to get to a point where we still could not have proper conversations...just for the chance to go and study the language even more at university. A total of 13-14 years of study before even our own teachers expected us to be able to speak fluently. Nuts, in my opinion, especially considering that educational expectations in other subjects were rather high, and the average level of achievement quite admirable when compared internationally.
One of the complicating factors is that the province where I lived also has French immersion schools available. They are part of the same public school system, and free to attend, and kids do emerge with the ability to speak fluently or close to it. So, there is a general assumption that the few people who care about their kids learning French will send them to one of those schools. This reinforces, in my view, the attitude that French at other schools is just a necessary evil and not important. Of course, it's not so simple - many factors influence what school a child attends (location, etc.), so many kids who perhaps might care about French end up in a regular anglophone school.