Does the Curriculum Enrich or Exhaust the mind? An essay by David, Grade 10.
The quote “Learning never exhausts the mind” is something that needs to be considered by the curriculum authors. It also applies to learning any new language; learn it little by little until you really start to feel it. Sadly, this isn’t the case with the Foreign language curriculum for English speaking schools in Canada.
Upon finishing tenth grade French, I slowly began to realize how ineffective this course was at teaching me a language. The classes would barely teach me anything useful about speaking French, instead, there would be a constant drilling of conjugations and uncommonly used terms I would have to memorize for a test. French class would consist of me receiving a paper article to read. I would start cluelessly blinking at the paragraphs and failing to understand the endless sea of words that I had never encountered in my life. Minutes would pass staring at the large piece of paper in front of me, leaving my eyes as dry as my thoughts. I would walk out the class completely unaware of what I just read, let alone learned. Surprisingly, I finished the course with an A. This led me to realize that the main objective of the curriculum was for us to memorize words and grammatical rules which we would later regurgitate onto the test, and forget all about it the next day.
I started observing the class to see how my peers were handling this experience. I was not surprised to see everyone struggling. The most you would hear a student say was “may I go to the bathroom please?” in French, which they memorized instead of learning. Not only did they struggle to speak simple phrases, but they had absolutely no interest in learning the language. I understand that not everyone is enthusiastic about learning French, but I think that the main reason for their lack of interest was the content they were taught. Work that was assigned to them was something like researching the effects of deforestation using only French sources. This poses a massive problem as most students could only understand a fraction of what they were reading. These tasks were beyond the students’ knowledge of the language, which simply didn’t teach them anything but how to copy and paste whole paragraphs into Google Translate. Instead of speaking the language, they were taught to write and read paragraphs without knowing how to talk with someone. The curriculum is abstruse, making students despise the subject.
There are also statistics that further prove the underperformance of the French curriculum. 50 percent of students were expected to graduate the French curriculum with basic fluency by 2012, but only 2 percent of graduates were fluent. This shows that the method used to teach students, as well as the topics, were not designed to teach spoken French.
Though many students tend to blame their teacher first, the main problem lies within the course itself. “The real problem is that we’re teaching students complex grammar and vocabulary, but not teaching them how to communicate. And we don’t teach language in the way that students actually learn it organically.” Shannon Bourbonnais, primary school French teacher in Vancouver wrote in herThe Tyee article in 2007. The information provided may be out of date, but it is relevant as the issue is still observed today.
By this point it’s pretty obvious that the French curriculum needs a revision. In my opinion, the basics of the language need to be emphasized more, such as conversations, pronunciation and so on. The main reason languages exist is to communicate. So why not start there? But, students should not be bombarded with formal grammar and vocabulary which should be introduced when they are comfortable with the basics. French should be taught in a more interactive way so that students graduate with at least some ability to hold a basic conversation in it. Language shouldn’t exhaust the mind, it should be a skill that enriches it.