Professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist, he has notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and The prose of Alain Grandbois, or read and reread The Voyages of Marco Polo (Nota bene, 2019).
When it comes to spelling and spelling reform, we invoke the legendary difficulty of French spelling, its non-phonetic character and its many exceptions, which make learning both long and arduous. It is then easy to come, after a few well-chosen examples, to the need to rationalize it, so that less time is devoted, in class, to its teaching, which would liberate, argue those who are in favor of it. kind of reform, hours to teach something more relevant. Reform proposals follow, which always go in the direction of greater standardization.
One of the problems with this reasoning of the reformers is that it is based on a misdiagnosis by implying that our students would make fewer mistakes and therefore write better, if the spelling of French was reformed in the sense of increased rationalization.
In reality, the vast majority of spelling errors that we correct in the copies of CEGEP students, who have just spent eleven years on the benches of primary and then secondary school, are errors that one would be tempted to qualify. nicely “careless mistakes” if they were not repeated over and over again, copy after copy, as if the inattention indulgently invoked rather bordered on nonchalance, or even I-don’t care: forget about “s” in the plural , from “e” in the feminine, absence of capital letters at the beginning of the sentence, verbs poorly in tune with their subjects, pronouns in poor agreement with their antecedents, homonymic confusion (between “a” and “à”, “ce” and “se”, “So much” and “you”, “faith” and “liver”, etc.).
Unless all basic spelling rules were rejected, none of the proposed reforms would therefore succeed in improving the spelling of these students. In other words, by regularly proposing spelling reforms which are often full of interesting and intellectually stimulating proposals, the reformers miss the real problem, which is rather to be found in the way in which spelling is taught.
That students who have so poorly mastered the basics of spelling their language find themselves in CEGEP, this is perhaps where the scandal lies, more than in the spelling difficulties. Indeed, if they make such mistakes, which, in other times, were committed by primary school students, would it not be because we let them do it and it never happened to them? prevented from obtaining the passing grade, and much more, in all their subjects, including French? The requirements for this mastery of the written language have been reduced so much that we consider normal and acceptable, not only in the classes, but also within school principals such as former school boards, and up to ministry, that students who struggle to write three words in a row without making a spelling mistake graduate from high school with flying colors. The important thing is the graduation rates and the statistics which serve to mask this reality and which authorize the regular satisfaction of civil servants.
Learning to spell, it must be said, is not that difficult; but it is above all a question of precision, of rigor, of personal discipline. These are acquired by memorizing grammatical rules, but also by repetition, by the constant mobilization of attention. This acquisition also implies that the pupils agree to make the necessary efforts not to make mistakes, constantly reread themselves, etc. It is mainly these requirements that are lacking in Quebec schools, and which have the consequence that we very often come out without having acquired not only an adequate working method, but also a will to do well without which it is difficult to enter with a reasonable chance of success in higher education.
Because it is obvious that the less effort is required of a child or adolescent, the less he will do. And the less it is confronted with complexity, the less it will be able to accomplish complex tasks. It is not true either that the majority of these students who arrive in our classes at CEGEP have spent a lot of time learning the mysteries of the multiple exceptions of French spelling. They hardly “lost” any more in learning essential elements of the language. Most of them ignore almost everything about the present subjunctive and its usage, the relative pronoun “dont”, the conjugation of the past simple, not to mention the famous rule of the agreement of the past participle with the auxiliary have when the direct complement is placed in front of the verb. A teacher is happy if, out of a group of thirty-five or forty students, two or three are able to remember and explain it. Sometimes it seems that we only scratch the surface of the most complex spelling or grammatical notions for fear of scaring off young minds that we prefer to pamper.
One could, however, make a final argument against the reformers who want to simplify the spelling at all costs. Young Japanese are obliged, from the age of six, to know three different writing systems (one ideographic, the kanji, and two phonetics, the kana) and deepen their knowledge of the first (which has thousands of signs) throughout elementary school. Looking at Japan’s high-tech success, it doesn’t appear that the complexity of reading and writing is a barrier to successful learning in other fields. Quite the contrary. The qualities of rigor and discipline that one acquires by learning something complex are easily transferable to other subjects.
The Quebec school might have a lesson to learn from it.