My name is Glyn Lewis, and I am the executive director of the British Columbia and Yukon branch of Canadian Parents for French. I am a product of the French immersion program in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. I will discuss my notes in English because it is a little easier, but if you ask questions in French, I will be able to answer in either French or English.
I won't reiterate too much of what Diane has said. I think she has given a very good, comprehensive overview of the programs and the situation here in B.C. and the Yukon, but I will add a little bit, and then I will speak more specifically to my own personal experience and how that might relate to the Official Languages Act and any revisions that might be coming, or considerations for revisions.
There is a list of questions that we were presented with before we came. I reviewed them and there are three questions that I really want to focus on and drill down on a little bit more.
The first question was whether the quality of FSL programs meets the expectations of students and their parents. As you can see from Patrick's example, French immersion programs generally are very, very strong. I would say that is the case across Canada, but it's entirely the case here in B.C. and in the Yukon. We have excellent teachers. The program is very immersive. There's a very strong community that supports the program. The goal of French immersion, we always say, is for our graduates to become functionally bilingual by the time they graduate, and I think that is the case for most students who reasonably apply themselves. If you apply yourself a little bit more, I think you become incredibly proficient by the time you graduate.
Where I think there are legitimate concerns and challenges is with core French, core French being basic French. As Diane mentioned, it's a requirement that all students in B.C. take a second language course between grades 5 and 8. By and large the offering of that second language is French, and that's mostly because of incentives that come through federal French funding, but it doesn't have to be French. Students could take Mandarin or Punjabi or some other second language.
The enrolment in core French in B.C. is 180,000 students, so it works out that almost one-third of the entire student population in B.C. learns core French. Unfortunately, we've seen enrolment in core French drop precipitously over the last 20 years, and there is a host of reasons for this. I'll just quickly identify a few that we've seen.
One is the fact that teachers who are teaching core French do not feel comfortable teaching French, and this is consistently shown in studies and in surveys. They, themselves, don't feel comfortable speaking the language. A 2008 study that was done by Wendy Carr at SFU showed that 80% of elementary and middle school core French teachers do not feel comfortable speaking French, so you can only imagine the negative impact that would have on the learning of students or the inspiration of students to develop an affinity for the language and the culture.
The second concern we have with the core French is that, being sometimes isolated from francophone communities and the French language and French culture, you really need to have extracurricular activities to complement what you're learning in the classroom. That's why we have to look at exchange programs and furthering exchange programs and immersive cultural experiences to complement what they're learning in the classroom, to hopefully inspire them to continue to learn the language and to pursue the language. That was the one question I wanted to address.
The second question that I really liked, from the list I was given, was whether there are resources available to help immigrant students who do not have French as their mother tongue or official language spoken to integrate into French second language programs. This was a question about new Canadians and whether there are resources and strategies to help them participate in FSL programs.
By and large I think we have very good, high participation of new Canadians in FSL programs. There is a school in Burnaby where the majority of the families who participate in French immersion do not speak French or English at home, so these are families who would speak mostly Mandarin or Punjabi or some other language. I think generally speaking we see that new Canadians, when they come to Canada, see Canada as a bilingual country—more so, sometimes, than we see that ourselves—and they want their children to be part of this language. They want their children to integrate and to embrace the language and the culture of the place where they have landed and which they are now calling home, so they seek the program.
I think the challenge with those families—and Diane mentioned this in her remarks—is to make sure that we are creating enough space that we don't turn any of those families away. I just want to make that comment with respect to FSL for new Canadians.
The last one—and I am mindful of time—is the question of whether second language instruction should be protected by constitutional guarantees. This is a question that Diane mentioned in her remarks. We are graduates of programs like French immersion, but our children aren't guaranteed the same rights and access to learn French as well.
I live here in Vancouver. I can outline my backstory very quickly. My mom was born in Greece. She went to Paris to become a French teacher. She moved to Vancouver where she met my father who is a sixth-generation Canadian from the west coast. My mom is a multicultural, multilingual, internationalist, and my dad was a meat-and-potatoes, anti-French west coast guy. I have always wondered how they met and how they thought it was a good idea for them to be together.