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Does it require reading and discussing some sort of "classic" literature (i.e. Les Miserables if you're Anglo-Canadian, works of Shakespeare if you're French Canadian)?
I suspect most second-language students in Canada would not have attained a sufficient level of comprehension in order to be able to read this type of stuff.
There are some exceptions for sure: if you go to a French-language school in Ontario your English classes are the same as if you were in a fully English school. So will be studying Shakespeare for sure.
But in French schools in Quebec? Probably not. Maybe in some of the private high schools.
Also it could be that in some French immersion schools (that teach little anglos) the kids would be good enough to read French classics by the time they reach their teen years.
But it's certainly not the norm in most Canadian schools.
If not in school, where do most Canadians pick up their ability to speak other languages?
Most Canadians don't end up "picking up" another language during the course of their lives.
Most Canadians who speak more than one language generally "fell into" it accidentally. As in, they grew up in Canada with Italian or Chinese parents so they speak English and Italian, or English and Chinese.
There are specific sub-demographics in Canada that are exceptions to this rule but for most Canadians, this is pretty much it - they speak the language(s) they learned at home plus whatever the main language of their schooling was. In a majority of cases those are one and the same so people are unilingual.
Most Canadians don't end up "picking up" another language during the course of their lives.
Most Canadians who speak more than one language generally "fell into" it accidentally. As in, they grew up in Canada with Italian or Chinese parents so they speak English and Italian, or English and Chinese.
There are specific sub-demographics in Canada that are exceptions to this rule but for most Canadians, this is pretty much it - they speak the language(s) they learned at home plus whatever the main language of their schooling was. In a majority of cases those are one and the same so people are unilingual.
I didn't mean that "most Canadians" pick up a second language in their lifetimes, but for those who are multilingual, where does it come from? Would more Quebeckers learn English through exposure to English-lanugage entertainment than they would in school?
I didn't mean that "most Canadians" pick up a second language in their lifetimes, but for those who are multilingual, where does it come from? Would more Quebeckers learn English through exposure to English-lanugage entertainment than they would in school?
School would be further down the list for where most multilingual Canadians got their knowledge.
I would rank them this way:
- Family: the language was spoken in your household, maybe taught to you as a child
- Living as a minority (eg as a francophone outside Quebec, an anglophone in Quebec), or at least in an area where the other language group is fairly present
- For some francophones: American popular culture, which supplements whatever English they do teach in school
- For some anglophones: going to a French immersion school
- basic non-immersion second language teaching in school
Barely anyone speaks French conversationally on the West Coast so because I didn't pay attention in French class during school, I didn't pick up much. It's not really stressed as being important to know French out here, like it is in Central and Eastern Canada.
When I lived in Northern Ontario, many people were bilingual, even if they went to Anglo school because of the reasons Acajack stated. I picked up a bit more French there, since many people did speak it conversationally and I had a bunch of French friends.
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