Not all bilingualisms are equal

I received an e-mail a week or so ago about an alarming French government internal report. The subject of the report was juvenile delinquency, its causes and potential prevention, and it was submitted to the minister of the interior, Dominique de Villepin (that’s right, him again!) in October 2004 and recently published on the web. It suggested these problems have their roots in very early childhood. So far so good.

The report went on to say that the problems are often linked to children’s linguistic difficulties, i.e. that they don’t speak French well and are thus not well integrated at school, even in nursery school. Here’s the alarming bit: to make headway against this problem, the mothers of immigrant children aged 1 to 3 should take it upon themselves to speak only French at home, “so that the children get used to expressing themselves only in French”. It also suggests ways of getting round the father-obstacle, who, according to the report, often insists on speaking “patois” at home. How’s that for respect for cultural origins? If this doesn’t work, especially as the child gets a little older, the child should see a speech therapist. This is like saying that if I have trouble getting over the death of a close relative or friend, I should a doctor who can dry up my tear ducts. What follows is a series of escalating recommendations to snuff out the “causes” of “deviance”.

This part of the report is the antithesis, the negation of everything I have come to believe about bilingual education, or about how to motivate immigrant children to learn a new language. Specifically, for children to be motivated, the system must acknowledge the value, the worth of their own language. This is a basic sales rule. The salesman says, “You’re absolutely right. On the other hand....” Wow, France still has a way to go in accommodating bilingualism, I thought. Of course, an American reading this might be tempted to say it is simply a manifestation of France’s reluctance to admit that French is no longer the world’s primary international language.

French people are always saying that they are not good in languages and that languages are not taught well in French schools. So when they meet bilingual people, especially children, their reaction is a mixture of admiration, envy and embarrassment. They say, “How wonderful! They’ll have such an advantage in life.”

At the international school here in Lyon, language is a big part of the curriculum. Language sections include English, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Japanese. The one in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris also offers Scandinavian languages. Friendships between kids in these schools run right across cultural and language barriers. French is the common language, but most kids are also proud of their “other” culture, too. But if bilingualism is encouraged and nurtured for these and other “noble” languages, deemed important or useful, for all others, it’s considered a handicap.

All this made me sit up, not only because I make my living in a language profession (translation) but also because I was exposed to similar attitudes when I was growing up in the New York area. There, the “devalued” language was Spanish. Of course, there was no official government policy to stamp out Spanish in American schools – the United States has no official language, whereas France does –; on the contrary, there was “bilingual education”. When I was growing up this term meant something very different to me than it does now. Now it means developing parallel speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in two languages and two cultures. Then it meant help kids along a little in Spanish until they learn English well enough to do without Spanish. That was the prevailing attitude in my family circle about what the goals of the program should be. Here’s a personal account from another American about how foreign cultures can be devalued in childhood. This time the venue is South Texas. The timeframe is the same, i.e. the 1960s and 1970s.

Then I spoke to some friends who are primary school teachers. One of them taught last year in Vénissieux, one of Lyon’s “difficult” neighborhoods. There was only one child in her class whose parents were born in France. The others were all North African, Turkish, Eastern European, etc. The picture I got from her was completely different from the one painted by the government report. Immigrant children attend “initiation” classes to help them get up to speed in French (it’s not their foreign parents who are going to teach them). Parents, she said, are often receptive to the idea of speaking French, if they can, to their kids. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they (the parents) feel lost in the French educational system in general. In class when the kids speak Arabic or another language, the teacher might ask them (politely) to repeat it in French for the whole class. Or if the child is, say, counting in Spanish, she might ask him to count to ten for the whole class so that the others can learn it. The school she taught at even offered Arabic classes after school for kids who speak it at home but haven’t learned how to write it. The big difference between this school and the international schools, she said, besides the lack of a formal bilingual program, is that the French language doesn’t work as a federating force. At recreation, the Arab kids speak Arabic to each other, the Turkish kids speak Turkish, etc.

It was interesting to look at the people the commission members interviewed: technical advisors in various ministries (interior, education, etc.), a district attorney, a child psychiatrist, the president (recteur) of a school district in the Paris suburbs, two officials of a parents association and a representative of a risk-management consulting firm. Hmmm, maybe they should have interviewed actual teachers, or even the cafeteria workers. Could the report’s well-intentioned but overzealous and misguided recommendations about language reflect a police-and-security-oriented interior ministry, even if the report was supposedly “interministériel”, as opposed to what the ministry of education might have produced had it been running the show?

I hope so.