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Why I'm Partial to Partial Immersion

My family moved recently to Victoria from Ottawa. In Ottawa our
children were participating in the bilinguel prograume of the Catholic School
system - helf a day in French, half a day in English. We'd been very satis-
fied with this approach es it seemed to result in repid acquisition of
French language skills while mainteining a strong level of understanding in
the cnildren's mother language abilities.

When we arrived in Victoria, we wented to find a school programme thet
would be as Similar to their Ottawa experience as possible, vartly because
we expected to be returning to Ottawa within « few years and we wanted them
to be able to re-integrate themselves into the bilingual Catholic system.

Our choice, as it turned out, wes between Willows School and Clover-
Gale School, as they were the only two schools in the Victoria erea offering
French immersion. We were impressed with both schools, by tiie principals,
teachers and tnaeir extra-curricular activities. However, we were some-
what apprehensive about Willows full immersion, especially for our Grade 3
daughter, as we were not sure she would be able to adjust to a tctal immersion
situetion, after three and a half years in a bilingual environment. We
were also concerned thet for our kindergarten age son, the sbsence of any
English at school for the first three and a helf yeers could lead to his
having week basic skills in Inglish, such as spelling end resding. So, we
chose Cloverdale, which we found had e« higher French content than the

bilingual Ottawa system, but a bit less of the total immersion environment
poo AaA We Wild AWS .

range of choices. Competence in both langueges can be developed by more then
one method. Our hope and objective, is tnat our children will eventuelly

be bilingual, at home with two international lengueges. Cur choice for
reaching that objective is an educational programme that provides strong
second language training, while not ignoring the basic lenguage skills of

the mother tongue. For us, and for many ovher perents, this means a partial
immersion or bilingaul programme. Personally, I believe that meking these
alternatives available to more Canedians would result in even greater

demands for schools where young Canadians can leern both of Canada's

national languages. And thet, after all, is whet Canedian Parents for French
is all about.

‘By Stewart Goodings
nditor''s Note
The average percentage of French given in this vartial immezsion programme

is slightly higher than in the regular immersion programies, Kindergarten
receives 90% French; grades 1-4 60%; and grades 5 = 7 75% French.