17
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by bbbhltz@beehaw.org to c/canada@lemmy.ca

I was very lucky growing up, and my little middle school in my little village in Nova Scotia offered French Immersion (late, started grade 7).

Sure, some of my teachers were anglophone, but the rest were Acadian. When I went to university I didn't think much about it, but soon discovered that I was functionally and operationally bilingual. I continued to study French at university where all of my teachers happend to be from la belle province and graduated.

Now I'm a professor in France. I've been doing this for about 17 years. My students greatly underestimate their level in English, yet here I am correcting 750-word essays written by 1st year students who have only "studied" English for an hour or two a week since middle school. Are they good? Meh... But they are better than they imagine.

Canada is supposed to be bilingual. I've seen different numbers fly around over the years regarding the percentage of bilingual Canadians. How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?


Addendum:

These maps are not directly related to the question, but I came across them while looking things up.

This is from 2016. I like showing this to my students. They always ask me why I bothered learning French.

And this is from 2021 and is a little bit related to my question, but only covers English and French.

source

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] bbbhltz@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Yep, I know how ~~charts~~ maps work. I didn't say they were related. I couldn't find anything similar to the 2016 map so I threw in something related to the question I was asking. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll add a little note to my post.

It is great that you're fluent. Barely anyone in my cohort/graduating class kept up their French, and the students that did core French might have known a decent collection of phrases and useful vocabulary.

this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
17 points (90.5% liked)

Canada

7241 readers
494 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


๐Ÿ Meta


๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Provinces / Territories


๐Ÿ™๏ธ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


๐Ÿ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


๐Ÿ’ป Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


๐Ÿ’ต Finance, Shopping, Sales


๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Politics


๐Ÿ Social / Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS