The executive director of Canadian Parents for French, a group advocating for increased French second-language learning in schools, said the provincial government’s new French second-language education plan can’t even be considered immersion.
Under the new plan, which will come into effect next September, kindergarten and Grade 1 students will spend half the day “engaged in exploratory learning in French,” according to the government’s press release.
Children in grades 6,7 and 8 will spend 40 per cent of the day learning school subjects in French.
“Fifty per cent French is not immersion. The (education) minister is misleading New Brunswickers when he calls this immersion,” Chris Collins said in an interview.
“Ninety per cent is immersion, then 70 per cent in the older grades,” he said.
He said that the new plan lowers the bar for success by setting it at “conversational French.”
“What people need to understand is conversational French is not bilingual. We want to give our anglophone students the opportunity to become bilingual so that they can work in hospital and education systems in the province, so that they can get government jobs, and conversational French doesn’t do that,” he said.
“It’s like the government just gave up, like they just decided that conversational is enough, let’s just get this off our plate.”
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The new program will start in kindergarten, rather than Grade 3 as it does in the current system.
“It’s encouraging that they are going to start kids in kindergarten but there’s no reason that that couldn’t have been done without throwing French immersion out,” he said.
Collins said the new plan shares a lot of similarities with a controversial pilot program that has been running at Moncton’s Maplehurst Middle School.
Christina Robichaud, whose daughter Natasha attends the school, told Global News she has seen a noticeable decline in her daughter’s French skills since the program started.
“She enjoyed French very much when she started in Grade 3,” she said in an interview on Thursday.
“Now I see the difference in the fact that she’s not as comfortable. She’s found that she has lost vocabulary and as a result of not having those words readily available and the experience behind it, she’s losing confidence and it’s taking that downward turn.”
She said she and other Maplehurst parents don’t understand why the province would move forward with this plan without consulting them.
She brought Natasha to speak about these concerns at the legislature last week, prompting Education Minister Bill Hogan to say the student was being used as a “prop” on Wednesday.
Robichaud said she found that comment “demeaning.”
“It really took away an opportunity to see us as someone you could communicate with to really hear the story versus to be able to consider us just … a prop. So it’s quite insulting,” she said.
She plans on attending the public consultations on the new French second-language program in January.
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