Spotlight


Supporting French-Language Student Success

This feature requires the free <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer">Flash Player</a> version 7 or higher.

Transcript

Student: My name is Lorig. I’m a Grade 10 student at École secondaire Étienne-Brûlé here in North York. I have a younger brother who also goes to this school, in Grade 7. I am Armenian, and my mother and my grandmother and all the women in my family speak French, but we’re not French.

Student’s mother: I was born in Turkey. Since I had a diploma in French, I had the right to send her to a school like Étienne-Brûlé.

Student: Yay!
I have a lot of advantages because of speaking French. There are a lot of people who fight to get jobs, and … because I can speak French, I think that it’s a really, really big advantage for me.

Yves Desrochers, School Principal: Lorig will be able to go wherever she wants to work in French or in English, it doesn’t make any difference. Sometimes it’s even the parents, it was English-speaking parents, or one English-speaking and one French-speaking parent … Being bilingual opens a lot of doors.

Kathleen Wynne, Minister of Education: (speech) “How can we integrate students who only have one French-speaking parent into the French-language education system?” We have invested in the French-language schools, and today we’ve announced that it is very important for all the systems in Ontario to be open to all children who need education in English and education in French.

Madeleine Meilleur, Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs: I very warmly welcome the announcement that Minister Wynne made today, because this will help other parents who have come to Canada, or parents who want their child to learn a second language.

Student: There are a lot of things around me that are in French that I know, that I understand better than my English-speaking friends, because this is a bilingual province. All of my friends are really jealous, because I can speak French!