It is in no way an exaggeration to think that French as a common language is not doing very well with us and that it will do even worse if we do not act.
In this case, the school obviously has a crucial role to play. But, along with many other red flags, the poor quality of students’ French is worrying, and with good reason. What to do ?
We are announcing these days that we are going to give each teacher $300 for the purchase of books.
Here are some actions that, for my part, I would prefer. They require following the evidence and political courage.
Read
Learning to read is the gateway to language. Yet, unbelievably, we are not using, let alone consistently, what credible research has long established as the best way to teach all children to read—in short: syllabic, rather whether global or semi-global. The resistances, strangely, come for many professors in the sciences of education. I don’t know how to correct this terrible situation, but it absolutely must be done.
That’s not all. We know that prior knowledge is necessary to understand and reason when reading on a given subject. It is therefore necessary that the school transmits this knowledge which we would have agreed that they are essential. It requires a rich curriculum taught correctly and in a carefully thought out sequence.
In this regard, recent research has yielded results that should be known to all education stakeholders.
A follower of the two ideas that I have just stated (teaching children to read using proven methods and transmitting a rich cultural baggage), ED Hirsch, founded schools in the United States called after their program: Core Knowledge.
A randomized controlled trial followed more than 2,300 students for six years seeking to enter kindergarten at one of nine Denver-area Core Knowledge charter schools. By drawing lots, 700 had access to it. Their scores on state tests in grades three through six were compared to those of other children educated elsewhere. Their long-term cumulative gain, from kindergarten to grade six, is about 16 percentile points, which is huge. Concretely ? Applied everywhere, this program would rank the United States among the top five countries in the world in reading. Even better: in the only low-income school in the study, the gains were large enough to completely eliminate the achievement gap associated with parental income. wow!
Know how to decipher these little black signs on a page and deduce things from them by reading; have rich and varied knowledge to be able to do it on many subjects. This is the basis, and we would make great progress if we applied this systematically.
But for the school to fully play its role of preserving French, more is needed. To do this, it must transmit what embodies this language, brings it to life: literature, novels, song, poetry, essays, science. It is above all through all this that we learn to love it and that, little by little, we come to know ourselves, to define ourselves.
Quebec culture at school
Times are not easy for what seemed, until recently, self-evident: transmitting content that makes its rightful and therefore important contribution to a national culture.
Among other things, the various identities that make up the nation demand, with good reason, to be present in this course; with the powerful new media, an Anglophone cultural hegemony seeks to impose itself on the youngest and the not so young — and succeeds.
The answer here can only be political. We choose and impose a curriculum that makes its fair and therefore important contribution to the francophone culture of Quebec.
We increase our chances of success if we respect the two conditions presented above, which credible research sanctions. They are increased even more if the people who transmit this curriculum know and love it, on the one hand, and on the other hand transmit it with pedagogical and classroom management methods validated by the best research.
Above all, we will remember that the school is not society and that if the latter is above all governed by a commercial logic of responses to demands, the logic of the school is that of the proposal of an offer and of creating a link with humanity and its best.
The student who adores English songs will never know that he has everything he needs to be passionate about Richard Séguin, until he is allowed to know him. Ditto for Nelligan, for Tremblay, for Langevin, for…
Small bonus gift. When a spelling reform movement emerged in France, François Cavanna, founder of Charlie Hebdo, opposed it. He reacted by writing a magnificent love letter to the French language, a book entitled: Sweetheart let see if the Rose.
He briefly discusses the question of the past participle. You can read this beautiful pedagogy lesson here.