Some are wondering these days about how to improve the French skills of Quebec students following the report produced by three experts on French proficiency in college.
Only those who are not confronted with this situation are surprised by the general observation of the said report: after eleven years of learning French at the primary and secondary levels (compulsory courses each year, it should be remembered), CEGEP students show chronic reading and writing disabilities.
Whose fault is it to ask is justified, but perhaps it would be appropriate to propose in the same movement modifications to the methods currently employed for teaching the language.
Reading and writing are intimately linked, and it is counterproductive to imagine programs that emphasize only one of the elements of this binomial, reading and analyzing texts, while language takes root in us to define us as an acting person.
It is through narrative enunciation that language becomes effective and significant for those who find in it the consecration of their personality and the enhancement of their unique and intimate experience of human existence. And it is through the narrative (autobiographical or fictional) that the student understands the importance and scope of written language.
We should also integrate into the school curriculum, and this from an early age, regular literary creation workshops through which the student, seeing himself as a singular person, carrying a unique and differentiated story, will approach language not as a science or a matter that does not concern him, but as the Grail of his self-determination.
The young people to whom this type of workshop is offered quickly understand that mastering language opens the doors not only to advanced studies and the job market, but above all to their personal development, since language as a material of expression becomes liberating when you know how to use it wisely and in a beautiful way.
The act of writing fiction poses all the fundamental questions of grammar in a concrete way, adding as added value the discovery of oneself and of what unites us to others. Attached to a text analysis approach adapted to the exercises offered in the workshops, such an approach allows the student to assimilate the language and its articulation while freeing themselves from certain tensions inherent in their condition as a child or adolescent. .
By reading, but also and above all by writing, young people discover that they are not alone in the world, and that the questions that sometimes torment them find their appeasement in their ability to express them.
Such an approach can only be part of a redefinition of the programs, but also of the training of teachers, to whom we must teach the art of giving birth to the voice of young people through the writing of fiction, poetry or narrative.