Posted at 2:29 a.m.
Updated at 9:00 a.m.
Martin Girard
Engineer and author*
Dear readers, dear readers,
After focusing on recent surveys by the Office québécois de la langue française and the arguments of the sovereignist parties and the CAQ, I propose a new way of approaching francization in the era of modernity.
So, I remind you that when portable calculators arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had a debate about in which school year it became more advantageous to allow students to use this calculation tool during mathematics and science exams.
The proponents of antiquity lost the debate, because students could now spend more time understanding the calculations rather than wasting time doing them themselves.
There was a gain in the complexity of the concepts understood by the students, and therefore we could, for example, learn differential and integral calculus before university.
In my opinion, the learning of French in Quebec has reached a plateau, or even regressed, because we can no longer spend 50% of our time at school learning this language that only a few specialists master perfectly.
Other subjects – particularly new ones, such as computer science – now force us to reduce the time devoted to French to remain competitive on the international scene.
A thought for Romanian postdocs
Also, as spelling and grammar correction tools improve and are even free for some, I believe it becomes imperative to allow students and immigrants to use some of them just as we use a calculator.
It is much more important to know how to construct sentences and agree verbs, nouns and adjectives than to know by heart that “trumpet” takes a “p” and ends with “tte”. The proofreaders may correct you the first three times you type this word, but if you write it often, you will eventually write it without errors.
The primary goal is now to facilitate use to gain followers. Not to discourage a geophysics postdoc from Romania. If usage becomes easier and more people are interested in using our language as their adopted language, after a few years, the statistics will undoubtedly be much more positive.
And if we no longer wasted six years of schooling to learn by heart the verb to love in tenses which are practically no longer used, we would undoubtedly have more time to discover whole sections of our language which are currently shunned by non-speaking people. -French speakers.
More time to study great authors, renowned song composers, French-language theater and cinema.
It is by introducing works in French rather than forcing people to learn vocabulary and verbs by heart that we are likely to see people “live” a little more in French. A language is not just words, it is a large part of a people’s culture. If no one reads anymore The torrent or don’t look anymore The great seductionour language will become dead not because no one learns it, but because no one lives it anymore.
If we want to attract people to experience our culture, we must first change it to make it more accessible.
*Author of In Greta’s footsteps
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