More on language issues
I would like to have the opportunity to respond to a previous "view" printed on April 30th. First I would like to put a few facts straight, being a bilingual francophone. The author of the article wrote: "All you have to do is go back to the seventies and eighties when school had their own program that didn't cost anything" and this is where I want to put the emphasis on "we came out of school knowing a second language".
Well, if that were true, this person would have no problem applying for government jobs being a bilingual Anglophone now would she? The evidence is there. That whole generation that had the "old" teaching of French and English is not bilingual. Therefore a change was needed and it did happened with the Early French Immersion. I was taken aback when the provincial government made cuts to the Early French Immersion program, the message sent is: French isn't important enough to teach our children early. Let's put that on the back burner for now.
As for having English or French forced on us, may I remind the author that putting their kids in French Immersion is a choice, not an obligation and lets face it, Canada is a multi-cultural country and soon we will be required to speak not just English or French but a third language as well.
The francophones of this country had and still have little choice but to learn English early on, because the rest of this country is English, save Quebec, and not all francophones want to live in "la belle province". Economic pressures are the drivers here and for survival, being bilingual is a must, not a luxury, so I do agree with her, wake up and smell that coffee! Oh and by the way, being unilingual French isn't all that rosy either. The same jobs are denied to us as well…. Fair is fair after all!
Sandy Harquail
Dalhousie
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None.
We now get about 30% who do, and, if Methods and Resources were offered in EFI (which never have been), we could easily get to at least 50% of our students graduating with Advanced.
But now we will have 0%.
This is a human resources crisis waiting to happen.
I was born & raised in Restigouche, am unilingual anglophone, and would never have reached the level of professional success I have reached if I lived in NB because I would be restricted by my ability to speak French.
That is wrong.
A person's competence should be placed FIRST in a hiring decision, not their language.
I also refute that bilingualism is a must. It's not. Business will still go on. This is a global economy, and not much of it speaks French. English is the language of business. Even the Chinese understand that. There are hundreds of universities in China that do nothing but teach English so young Chinese people can be successful in business.
If the NB gov't and NB businesses wish to be as restrictive with language policy in the future as they are now, they will not be able to hire enough staff in the pending labour crunch. Statistically, that has been proven already by the experts.