French Class
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on March 18th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Since January, I have been taking French classes (Intermediare 1) conversational French given by the Collège Acadie Î.-P.-É., a new, small degree-granting institution created to provide post-secondary education on PEI to Prince Edward Island's francophone community. I've been taking this because I want to understand people better when we go to visit Mathieu's family, and so that I can understand French-language television better.
My experience with that has been mixed. On one hand, I really like the teacher, and I feel that the course has been useful in brushing up my grammar, and that I have genuinely learned some things. The teacher speaks slowly and with a perfect Standard French accent, and I can understand absolutely everything she says. She talks just like I learned in school. Also, the other people in the class are nice.
On the other hand, I don't like the course itself. The course was created by the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface in Manitoba, an institution very similar to Collège Acadie Î.-P.-É. in that it is a post-secondary institution serving a comparatively small francophone population in a predominantly anglophone province. It is kind of "modern" encounter-based in that the syllabus bounces all over the place with no structure or direction, and there seems to not be enough exercises built in to the course to actually make you stretch your abilities in comprehension and production. Of course, the whole thing is costing only $150, including the workbook, so the price is certainly right.
On a more fundamental level, though, the course suffers from a basic deficiency which I think is endemic to all French as a second language education (let's call it FSL, like ESL only French) in Canada. That is, it focuses heavily on Standard French as spoken in France, with comparatively little Canadian content, so you are exposed to comparatively little Canadian typical vocabulary choices, idioms or accents, and these courses are much less useful than they should be in helping you to actually understand someone from Québec or New Brunswick, or speaking to them in a way that sounds natural to them.
In a way I understand it, the standard language is what it is, and I think there is a broad consensus in the French-speaking world that to maintain what claim French still has to being an international language, it is imperative that its unity be maintained, and this is particularly pertinent to the way the language is taught. And all education in any language of course focuses on a standard, formal register of the language. But a side-effect is to make school French somewhat divorced from everyday French in a way that school English is not from everday English, because the actual standard register of the French language has real regional variation which is not acknowledged by French language education.
Sure a lot of unique North Americanisms in French are local variations and accents, but while there is considerable and significant local variations, a lot of features which are, for example, pointed to as characteristic of Acadian French, for example, the use of pis as basically a synonym for et, can be heard in French-language TV shows set in Montréal. So there is also a lot of unity to Canadian French, a lot of it driven by a common mass media, similar to how mass media is bringing English dialects in North America closer together. So it's not like these linguistic features can't be taught.
The thing that bugs me is that a lot of the stuff that I learned in school, either in Core French back in the day or from this course I'm taking now, when I use them on an actual French person I often get a puzzled reaction because the phrasing is uncommon in Canada or marked as French-French.
I think a good analogy is this: imagine that a Chinese immigrant, let's call him Zhang, comes to Canada and is referred to a course to learn English as a second language (ESL). Now imagine that the standard practice in North American second language English education was to teach British English, but that otherwise the differences between British and North American English are no less great. So poor Zhang comes out of the course saying things like, "Pip pip my good chap, I shall just put the groceries in the bonnet of the lorry." Imagine how English Canadians would react to this speech, particularly from someone who is already hard to understand because they have a Chinese accent. Some people would get the references but find the word choice very strange. Others would be completely baffled, relying on context to figure out what the poor immigrant was talking about. Imagine how this guy feels after he worked hard to learn English but half the times when he opens his mouth people look at him like he has two heads and tell him that what he's saying is actually British and makes him sound like a prat 
and no one here actually speaks like that. I think he'd be a little frustrated.
Imagine too if there was some degree of recognition of the fact that there are some minor, colourful dialectical differences between British and Canadian English that they should mention in school, so maybe the teacher happens to mention in class, in a sort of condescending way implying that you can go ahead and forget it after, that the locals also call a lorry a "truck." This might not be as useful to Zhang as he might hope.
I think I can understand the reasons why French language education needs to be the way it is in order to make it a practical world medium, but I really wish for the sake of those of us who need to use it for real and not just for tourism that it paid more attention to real regional differences in the de facto local standard in terms of accent and vocabulary. Particularly, I think that comprehension exercises should focus heavily on listening to Québec accents. I mean Christ, I remember an exercise in junior high where we had to listen to a guy talking in an Alsace accent, for God's sake. Could we maybe bring it a little closer to home?
And that's another thing about this course - the entire thing is built around a travel theme. All new vocabularly introduced by the course material itself except for (admittedly very useful) verbs and function words is pretty much travel-related. It's like the course was designed with the idea in mind that most people using it would be English people who mainly wanted to learn French for travel and tourism reasons. Maybe true in Manitoba, but the reality in the Maritimes is different where there is a significant population of first-language speakers and Québec is close by. A few people in the class this approach really would be useful for because they are big travellers, but me, I have barely ever left Atlantic Canada in my entire life, and there are no big trips on the horizon for me. I want my French to help me live here, and I find all this travel-themed crap extremely frustrating. It's not quite 100% travel, but I would like to see a much wider variety of situations addressed in the course material in terms of vocabulary building.
So anyway, I'm not sure if I'll take Intermediare 2, given that I have mixed feelings about it, but I still feel I need a lot of improvement, and I might decide to give it a go anyway - the price won't precisely break the bank I think. Or, I'll decide not to blow the money and reward myself with new curling equipment for next year lol.
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On March 20th, 2009 Michelle Knott wrote:
J'aime ceci! Grande rodomontade!! And yes, I used the free English to French translator! I'm guessing it also uses non-regional standard French!!