However, the Ministry of Education continues to resist including regional languages as examination subjects.ġ982: A Ministry of Education Circular permits the experimental teaching of other subjects (especially geography and history) in the regional languages.
No teacher training, materials, or other government support was provided.ġ970s: Local organizations in Brittany and in the Catalan- and Basque-speaking regions initiate bilingual schools regional governments begin to support the idea.ġ976: The Haby Committee recommends allowing the teaching of up to 3 hours per week of a regional language. The occupation of France by German troops during World War II leads to a particularly strong backlash against German in the Alsace region schools.ġ951: The Loi Deixonne gives four regional languages (Basque, Breton, Catalan, and Occitan) official educational status, permitting one hour of elective instruction per week.
#French monolingual free
Here are some of the major events in a chronology of France’s public conversation over the language of instruction.ġ539: The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts makes Parisian French the official language for the French government, replacing Latin.ġ635: The Académie Française is established to codify the orthography and lexicon of the French language and publish a dictionary.ġ794: Abbé Henri Grégoire presents his Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language to the National Convention.ġ881: The Third Republic establishes free compulsory primary education, mandating French as the language of instruction.ġ900-1950: Different laws and regulations punish the usage of regional languages, including anywhere on school grounds. Rather, the issues raised are legal and philosophical, as the French government, regional organizations, and citizens debate issues of minority language rights versus the unity of the nation and the protection of the French language in the face of international Anglicization.
#French monolingual how to
Interestingly, the debate over language of instruction in France rarely brings into consideration issues of how to ensure students’ understanding and learning achievement.
#French monolingual full
Bilingual programs are, however, now legally permitted with regional languages allotted a maximum of 3 hours of instruction per week and up to 50% time in history and geography-as long as the full quota of hours for French instruction is still respected. Although in recent years there has been less repression of non-French languages in primary schools, there is still little state support for bilingual education programs. Today, regardless of the language in which they first learned to speak at home, most French children will be immersed in French-based instruction from the first day in a state primary school. From the early to the mid-twentieth century, policies of punishment and shaming for using languages other than French at school led to a rapid decline in the number of speakers of France’s regional languages. This policy itself continued a trend dating since shortly after the French Revolution, when it was decided to favor Parisian French over the other languages of France as part of the democratic effort to ensure that all citizens could understand parliamentary debates and government documents. Yet since the establishment of compulsory primary education in the 1880s, French was proclaimed the sole language of instruction in state schools. Furthermore, France has numerous large immigrant communities: Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, and German are each spoken by more than 300,000 people inside France, with Arabic alone represented by over one million speakers. French has long been the sole medium of instruction in nearly all of France’s state schools-despite the fact that there are a number of regional languages in the country and numerous immigrant communities.įrance has some two dozen regional languages and dialects, seven of which are officially recognized: Corsican, Breton, Gallo, Basque, Franco-Provençal, Occitan and Catalan.