Thank you for giving me and our university the opportunity to present to you some of the details of our second language and multiple language training programs. Let me first say, to the original question concerning the extent to which UBC receives funding from the federal government, that we received in the last fiscal year $215 million, which was mostly in research funds. That comprises approximately 12% of the operating budget of the university. The operating budget is about $1.8 billion, and the federal government contribution, mostly for research, is about $215 million.
We have a number of programs that deal with official language minority communities. I suppose it won't surprise people to know that many of the minority communities looking for training in English or French on the west coast, and certainly in Vancouver, are people of an Asian first language. There are a large number of programs provided, both through our downtown campus in the downtown east side, a very poor area of the inner city, as well as through our continuing studies department, of English as a second language. There are some very informal programs assisting people who are new immigrants in the community that have facilitators who are also part of that immigrant community teaching these immigrants as facilitators to learn English.
In our continuing studies program for French as a second language, we also have people not taking formal courses for credit at university but taking them through continuing studies. We have about 1,000 students a year learning French as a second language through those programs. There are also courses put on called “French in the Workplace” to assist people who do not have facility in English or in French but who are working in a bilingual situation, again through continuing studies. There is a French centre, which that department runs, that brings people together informally for French films, French language conversation, French cultural exchanges. All of that is done through the less formal continuing studies department.
Our major way of presenting French language training in a formal degree type of situation is through a department in the Faculty of Arts, the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies. About 5,000 French language students a year go through those programs at the bachelor, master, and Ph.D. levels.
The Faculty of Education also works to develop French certificate programs during the summers, either between degrees or as teachers on their summer breaks take French language training so that they're prepared to teach French as a second language in the schools. We also have an exchange program called “Go Global”. It has 13 French universities, including four in Quebec, as exchange universities from which students can come here to learn English or to which they can go to learn French.
Of areas in which we're looking to expand, the most important involves the concept of learning French across the curriculum, so that rather than simply teaching French as a language, we are attempting to increase the number of courses, across the whole range of courses at the university, that can be taught in French. We are very pleased and somewhat surprised at the thousands of students at the University of British Columbia who are bilingual and are able to take courses directly in French. We think we have professors in the hundreds who can teach. We're trying to construct a French curriculum in French, not just to let students learn the French language. This will lead to a bilingual degree, which could be in biology or law or medicine, as we develop that program further.
We're also extremely interested, harking back to the comment I heard made just before I began, in preparing students for bilingual work in the public service. We are very much aware that this is an area of growing demand, and we see the demand growing among students as well. Our expectation is that our French language training will only be increasing over the next few years as that demand comes, and university courses are somewhat demand-driven.
Given that situation, I would like to comment on the general population of UBC. Almost half the student body is of Asian descent of some type. Often we have students coming who have to do preparatory English language training to be able to get into degree-granting courses and programs at the university. In that regard, I might say that the largest Japanese and Mandarin language programs in North America are at the University of British Columbia.
In conclusion, Mr. Chair, we also have an intensive program in aboriginal languages. These are very restorative, in that many of the rich languages of the Pacific northwest have almost died out. Where there still is a flicker of use and knowledge of the language, we are trying to capture it in a research way and then develop programs for students from those communities to actually learn to speak their native languages.
Those are my opening remarks, Mr. Chair. I'd be happy to receive comments or questions.
