FOG BLOG NEW BRUNSWICK LOG: NB'S 50-50 FRENCH LEARNING MODEL- WORRIES SOME- HOW EFFECTIVE?
How effective was the 50-50 'Bathurst model' of French learning? Premier, top official say success rate was high, but numbers show below-average results How can a government come up with an entirely new French second-language program, from scratch, in less than a year and be sure it will work?
That's one of the questions dominating public consultation meetings on the province's plan to replace French immersion this fall with a new "50-50" model.
The answer, straight from Premier Blaine Higgs, is that he knows it will work because it's not entirely new.
"The interesting thing about this program is that it worked very well in Bathurst, for, I think, 10 years," Higgs said in a year-end interview. "All of the statistics show that program worked really well, but yet it was dropped for the current French immersion program that didn't have the same level of functionality at all. So go figure. So we're not inventing the wheel here. We're inventing a program that worked."
Assessment scores, however, call into question the premier's assertion that the Bathurst program had better "functionality."
And critics of the government's plan say the program was also very different in key ways that make it impossible to compare it to the current proposal.
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The program to be phased in starting this fall would see all students in anglophone kindergartens and elementary schools spend half their day learning in English and half in French.
Higgs has complained that French immersion hasn't been effective, because not all graduates are bilingual and most anglophone students aren't even in the program.
Various potential replacement models are being tested at 24 schools around the province, but the 50-50 program for K-5 students that the province has chosen is not among them.
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