Assignment 3

Describe the Home-School connection in your country

The home-school connection in France is not very important unfortunately. Teachers and schools don’t really try to build a relationship with the kids’ home. There is even a barrier between the two worlds. What happens at school is different from what happens at home. Parents often only care about their kids having good grades and don’t want to know about what they have learned and how they are doing at school. Teachers often don’t care about the kid’s culture. They don’t want to know what is different for this or this particular kid. The important thing is for the kid to get well integrated into the class.

However, there are some meetings which are organized between parents and teachers to try to communicate. But these meetings are just a way to talk about grades or some problems with the kids. If there is a serious problem with the kid, then the teacher may pay more attention to the culture, the life in his home and everything. But if the kid has good grades and a good behavior, they don’t really care. Of course there are exceptions and some teachers really try to see the different cultures that are present in his class and to talk about it, so the kid can grow up accepting both cultures, but it is not often.

Now, schools in France are trying to improve themselves because the Ministry of National Education has been strongly criticized. There are many things they are trying to work on, and one of them is the relationship between homes and schools. Researchers made an investigation and wrote a report: http://sitecoles.formiris.org/document/dossier-relations-ecole-famille/0/773. One thing is to try to give the families a role to play in their kids’ education. They have to be part of the process.

Violence at schools is a big problem in France. Teachers are afraid. And I think creating a real connection between the kids’ culture and the culture they are acquiring at school would be a good solution. We shouldn’t try to assimilate them to one culture, but we should try to integrate everybody with all the differences to create a world of tolerance and variety and it begins with education. To be educated is first of all to accept people and be openminded.

Assignment 2

How has my own family experience been impacted by responses to minority languages and cultures?

I am going to talk about my mother’s language. My mother is from Spain, from a town called La Coruna, in Galicia, where there is a regional language called gallego. People, in this part of Spain, speak Spanish and gallego. These are the two official languages.

But during the time my mother lived in Spain (until she was 25 years old), there was a dictatorship. And Franco, the dictator, wanted Spain to be a united country so he reinforced the patriotic feeling and prohibited to speak the regional languages. So mother only acquired Spanish, and not gallego. She came to France before Franco’s death.

And now we go to Spain every year. In the town I live everybody speaks gallego, but as my mother doesn’t know gallego, I never learned to speak gallego. So we had a lot of problems to speak with other people at the beginning. The whole generation that experimented the civil war (1936-1939) and the dictatorship (1939-1975) didn’t learn gallego. When Franco died, everybody wanted to speak gallego again. So we had to learn it to be able to understand everybody.

Many people speak Spanish, but sometimes they don’t want to or don’t know. In Spain, the topic of regional languages is really sensitive. It is really a political matter. Regional languages do mean something. It is not only a language. It involves the culture and the political problems that are behind.

First paper at EWU Pathways

Describe your own language learning experience and knowledge
using the terms BICS and CALP

My mother is from Spain and my father is from France. They both know each language, but not very well the foreign language. I learned to speak French and Spanish at the same time, but in separate ways. My mother spoke to me in Spanish, my father in French. So, for me, they were two separate worlds and I didn’t mix both languages. I was able to use both languages in BICS ( for social interaction )

Before going to primary school, I learned to read and to write in Spanish with my mother at the same time as my older brother. Then I went to primary school where I learned to read and write in French. So I learnt CALP (academic skills) in both languages and it was alright. But after that, I didn’t take Spanish classes, so I didn’t improve my Spanish in CALP, while I have improved my CALP in French: my vocabulary has increased, I can express myself and write really better.

When I entered 6th grade, I went to an European class where I learned intensive german and I spent 6 months in Germany. So, at the same time, I learned both BICS and CALP in the country. It has been really useful for me to spend time in Germany. I went to Highschool there and could really improve my BICS (talking to other children, playing with them, interacting in any situation) and my CALP ( because I also had to do my homework and the exams like the german pupils, so I had to reach their level in CALP). In 6th grade I also learned latin and greek, only CALP because we can’t speak them. But we learned a lot of technical words to be able to translate old texts.

When I was in 7th grade I met a group of american adolescents and we became close friends. They came from California and only spoke English and a bit Spanish. And I learned to speak English with them. They spoke in English and I could understand them more and more, and I began to be able to speak. After a few months, I could really have a conversation with them (BICS). When I entered 8th grade I took English classes in Highschool and I learned CALP English (academic skills) but it was hard at the beginning, because I had learned it without the grammar. My CALP has improved during 4 years (I learned to write more properly and increased my vocabulary). But now I haven’t been using my CALP English for 7 years, so I really have to improve it.

Years later, when I went to the university I studied Portuguese, BICS almost. We learned how to interact and use our social skills. I have learned it for almost one year, but it is so similar to Spanish that I can understand everything and I can speak quite good. At the university, I also studied Spanish literature and history and had the opportunity to improve my CALP in Spanish, that is what I have been willing to do for quite a long time. My academic skills have very easily improved and I think I am now comfortable in CALP in both languages French and Spanish.