Good morning, everyone. I'm honoured to be here today to represent the University of Toronto as Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies of the OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which is the Faculty of Education of the University of Toronto.
I'm going to use the six minutes allotted to me to provide an overview of what the University of Toronto is doing to promote French and bilingualism. You know as well as I do that the University of Toronto is essentially an English-language institution, and the actions taken at the University of Toronto to promote French are often little known. I'm going to provide this overview to show you everything the University of Toronto is doing.
The University of Toronto has a special history and mandate. It has been in existence for nearly 200 years, but, since 1853, the university has offered courses in French as well as courses in French literature. It thus started doing so 14 years before Confederation and 12 years after the union of Lower Canada and Upper Canada.
The university has imposing collections of works in its French-language libraries, and a number of institutes, research centres are advancing knowledge on issues concerning the French language and the Francophonie.
With regard to demographics, as is the case for most Canadian universities, the vast majority of students at the University of Toronto come from the immediate region: 82% of students are from Ontario, 1.2% from Quebec, and 9% from foreign countries. This situation is typical of Canadian universities in general. We have 72,000 students, including 25,000 whose mother tongue is a language other than English or French. Today I could talk to you about everything the University of Toronto does for English as an official language, but I'm going to focus on what it does for French. So there are 25,000 students whose mother tongue is a language other than English or French and 613 students for whom French is their mother tongue, which represents roughly 1% of our student body.
However, we have a larger number of francophone students because the figures we have do not enable us to determine who consider themselves francophones. We only have figures from students who apply for admission and say that French is their mother tongue. We know and you know as well that these kinds of statistics are often not entirely clear. Three hundred and seven students come from member countries of the Francophonie, that is 4% of our 8,000 foreign students.
In a study I am currently conducting with Professor Sylvie Lamoureux of the University of Ottawa, we have examined data from the Ottawa University Application Centre to determine in which Ontario universities Ontario francophones enrolled from 1998 to 2006. We discovered that, out of 15,000 francophone students—who are students completing high school in French-language schools or graduates from English-language schools, but who say their mother tongue is French—half went to the University of Ottawa and 15% to Laurentian University in Sudbury. In third place, for the largest number of francophone students enrolled, was the University of Toronto with 618 students. During that eight-year period, the universities of Windsor and Carleton came next in terms of enrolments, and the bilingual Glendon College, of York University, in Toronto, was quite far behind with 212 students, one-third of the number of students we took in.
We offer French-language university programs. Undergraduate students at the University of Toronto have the opportunity to choose a major in French. We currently have 321 students who have opted for a major in French studies. They specialize in language, literature, culture, civilization, economics and so on. We also have a number of students who are taking French courses, but who are not included in that group of students really specializing in French. The department offers a number of courses in Quebec history, culture and literature as part of this major in French. We also have 13 students in the master's program and 73 students in the doctoral program in French studies at the University of Toronto.
You see that we are producing a lot of sources of knowledge and future researchers who will be specialists in French later on.
French-language knowledge is not a requirement for admission to our programs, except for students doing a major in French. They have to have an adequate knowledge of the language to be able to do those studies.
In addition, a number of master's and doctoral programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science require knowledge of French, whereas the master's or doctoral thesis requires students to work on Francophone issues in Canada. In that case, students must have knowledge of the French language.
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where I come from, every year trains 1,300 students in education, all future teachers. We are offering a French cohort for future teachers of French as a second language, immersion or core French.
In the past three years, we have trained 173 future teachers of French as a second language. A study by the Ontario College of Teachers recently showed that 70% of graduates from a French teacher training program, whether it be for French as a second language or as a mother tongue, find a permanent job in the year after they complete their education, compared to only 25% of graduates from English-language programs. There is a much higher permanent employment rate if you graduate in French. This rule applies to our students as well; they very easily find work in the first year.
The Institute also offers master's and doctoral programs. In the past 10 years, nearly 435 students have taken French courses at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education or have conducted research and prepared theses on francophone issues. Some of those theses are written in English, others in French. In all, a very large number of theses and essays have been written on French or the Francophonie in education.
We also offer courses to provide additional qualifications for active teachers who have to go back to university to specialize. The Institute offers 100 different additional qualifications courses and seven of those courses are for teachers of French as a second language. They attract approximately 240 teachers every year.
Lastly, the University of Toronto also has a school of continuing education, which offers adult courses in French as a second language. This year, we had 12 different courses, with 44 sections, and more than 600 students were enrolled in our French second-language courses for adults.
Allow me to say a few words about research. The University of Toronto is the number one university in Canada in research supported by outside funding every year. We have a number of research centres that focus either directly on French or the Francophonie or on other subjects, but with a francophone component.
I'll cite only four examples. The purpose of the Centre d'études de la France et du monde francophone, established by the French Embassy and the Faculty of Arts and Science in 2007, is to combine everything that is done at the University of Toronto in the area of French-language teaching and research on francophone issues, and to promote student exchanges and maintain bridges with the francophone communities in Ontario and the rest of Canada.
The second important research centre is the Centre Joseph-Sablé, whose research focuses on 19th century France and which houses archives that exist nowhere else, such as the Émile Zola archive, which comes from the Zola family. People come from around the world to work on those archives at our university. It is a centre that houses an enormous number of documents on 19th century France, and it is an important place.
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has two education research centres that are no doubt of interest to you. The first, the Modern Language Centre, has been in existence for more than 30 years. It conducts research on second-language instruction. Research on French as a second language has always been a very important component of that centre.
By conducting research and demonstrating that immersion is a program that works well, the centre has really popularized the idea of immersion in Canada in the past 30 years.
The Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne focuses on linguistic minority issues, the francophone minorities in Ontario and across Canada. It was my pleasure to be the director of that research centre for 10 years. It is a centre that is very active and that receives a number of research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It is very successful in that field.
The University of Toronto has entered into research partnerships. The most important one on the francophone side is with Laval University for the writing of the Dictionnaire biographique du Canada. This is a fully bilingual resource, on line and accessible free of charge, which provides biographical information on prominent Canadians who died between the year 1000 and 1930. This partnership has been in existence for 50 years and has also been funded through federal research funding granted over the years.
We still have a lot of research partnerships. For example, over the past 10 years, approximately 200 researchers from the University of Toronto have cooperated on research projects conducted by Quebec universities at francophone universities and have been involved with those research teams directed by researchers from Quebec.
The University of Toronto has an exchange program with Laval University. Every year, one of our students can study at Laval University on a full one-year scholarship.
We've also entered into agreements with six universities in France and a number of student exchange agreements with several other francophone universities. Last year, some 40 students from the University of Toronto studied at francophone universities around the world.
This year, 265 students from the University of Toronto took part in international exchanges, while the university received 377 foreign students from 33 different countries. France was the country most often selected by our students: some 40 students went to that country. As part of those exchanges, we also welcomed some 40 students from France. This is the fourth contingent from a foreign country to come to Toronto.
Before closing, I am going to say a few words about the library of the University of Toronto, which is the largest in Canada and the fourth largest in North America, following those of Harvard, Berkley and Columbia. Out of a fund of 13 million to 14 million works, 472,000 are in French. Every year, the library buys more than 4,000 volumes in French published in foreign francophone countries and more than 1,000 volumes published in French in Canada. We generally buy everything in print so that our students and researchers have access to it.
The library also includes two collections linked to the research centres I just mentioned: that of the Modern Language Centre contains approximately 4,000 works on second-language teaching and learning, and that of the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne, which has more than 1,000 works on minority language and francophone issues in Canada.
To conclude, the University of Toronto is truly an international-level academic, intellectual and scientific environment. It offers considerable opportunities to students, society in general and the university world in French to develop and acquire knowledge.
We think our efforts to promote French and bilingualism in the context in which we operate—I would recall that the vast majority of our students speak a language other than English and French—could benefit from increased federal government financial support, mainly through scholarships for our master's and doctoral-level students who wish to specialize in various fields, including French. We also hope to see funding for research in the social sciences and humanities increased. That will be one way for us to help our researchers continue conducting research and to benefit society in general as a result, including people who are interested in the French language.
We also hope that the federal-provincial agreements on official languages will be extended and reinforced because our research centres benefit from them, in particular the Centre de recherches en éducation franco-ontarienne, which receives federal government grants. This is essential for the continuation of its activities.
Thank you for your attention.