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I agree that our schools can do better with English. But I still don't think it would be that useful or easy to maintain for a lot of people even if teaching was better. Even in Gatineau lots of people have good jobs with little English or at least English not even in the same galaxy as mine.
Just watching the hockey coverage and thinking that guys with very imperfect English like Michel Bergeron and Mario Tremblay had careers coaching in the anglo-dominated NHL even in American cities.
Just watching the hockey coverage and thinking that guys with very imperfect English like Michel Bergeron and Mario Tremblay had careers coaching in the anglo-dominated NHL even in American cities.
When we are training our youth to compete in a increasing globalized market having total fluency in English is a good thing. Hockey may not be the best comparison. I would be happy to see Quebec have the chance to be like Norway in fluency of English as we also protect French as our traditional language. I don't think this is possible in Canada for many reasons but paramount we have to always watch our back against encroaching English Eg. more and more language laws with the some effect.
It's funny because everyone French here wants their kids to speak English as well.
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I'm presuming all those parents want their kids to learn English so they will have a broader range of job opportunities in the 350 million Anglo to 7 million francophone demographic that is North America,if not learned properly at school acquired street English wont go far in most job interviews outside Quebec.
Saying that English is being eradicated just sounds really good for a particular narrative.
You might think differently if all these linguistic rules and regulations Quebec applies to its English population were directed at you instead of the Anglo demographic, i'm sure if Canada had the English equivalent of bill101 and language police directed at francophones you'd be equally as p.ssed off as i am.
I don't understand why you and others on here are so preoccupied about Quebec francophones need to have English proficiency at a native speaker level similar to mine. Most people in Quebec don't need that at all to fully live their lives. It's the exact flip side to your classic argument about French being useless to most English Canadians.
There's very much of a confusion there, and it tends to be exploited by people of all sides. Should francophone Quebecers know English because it's useful as a language for international communication? Or should francophone Quebecers know English because it's the main language of Canada, and then we'll be able to stop expecting anglophones or immigrants to know French, and French will go back to being the ethnic minority language some would have liked it to always remain, in Montreal at least? The problem is that English plays both these roles in Quebec.
But yes, people usually learn languages when they need to. I come from Quebec's French-language schools, and I'd like to say that my English is quite good today, but of course that's because to me it was useful to learn it. A large number of Quebecers just don't need English, no matter how much we may deplore all the opportunities and culture they're missing because of this.
There's very much of a confusion there, and it tends to be exploited by people of all sides. Should francophone Quebecers know English because it's useful as a language for international communication? Or should francophone Quebecers know English because it's the main language of Canada, and then we'll be able to stop expecting anglophones or immigrants to know French, and French will go back to being the ethnic minority language some would have liked it to always remain, in Montreal at least? The problem is that English plays both these roles in Quebec.
But yes, people usually learn languages when they need to. I come from Quebec's French-language schools, and I'd like to say that my English is quite good today, but of course that's because to me it was useful to learn it. A large number of Quebecers just don't need English, no matter how much we may deplore all the opportunities and culture they're missing because of this.
On the flip side, it's not always the case with Anglo-Canadians and many people who can be said to need French end up never learning... Auditor General, Supreme Court justices, key ministers in the federal cabinet, senior public servants...
That's why calls from anglophones for better English teaching in Quebec aren't really about a genuine concern for the career prospects of francophone young people, but rather about eliminating the annoyance for them that comes from dealing with unlingual francophones when they visit (or even settle in) Quebec.
When we are training our youth to compete in a increasing globalized market having total fluency in English is a good thing. Hockey may not be the best comparison. I would be happy to see Quebec have the chance to be like Norway in fluency of English as we also protect French as our traditional language. I don't think this is possible in Canada for many reasons but paramount we have to always watch our back against encroaching English Eg. more and more language laws with the some effect.
I am sort of in agreement, although I also don't necessarily see the socio-economic benefit for the owner of a Subway franchise on Route 116 in Marieville or a high school principal in St-Hyacinthe to be able to, like I can, perform a full literary analysis of a Shakespearean play.
Not everyone (and this is true of Quebec AND Norway) is going to be swinging deals with people in New York or Singapore as part of their everyday job.
And even so, not sure you really need native speaker level English (the kind you need to fully understand and appreciate Shakespeare) in order to do that.
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