A program that looks at teaching Basic French to students in an innovative new way is helping students get a better grasp on the language in the School District of Mystery Lake.
The program is called the Accelerated Integration Method (AIM) of Teaching French, and was brought to the district by Astra Holmes, a Basic French teacher at Westwood Elementary School. Holmes had met a student from Northern Ontario who was fluent in French who was able to tell her about the AIM program. Kristina Hearn, French language co-ordinator with the School District of Mystery Lake, says after that Holmes contacted her and she looked into the program. Hearn and Holmes attended a workshop in Saskatoon focusing on AIM and Holmes then tried the method on her students.
After seeing the success her students had, Holmes brought them to a two day in-service within the school district that happened last month. Twelve teachers participated and Hearn said that after the in-service five schools are now using the program and three will be using it form students in Grades 4 to 8. The School District of Mystery Lake received funding for the AIM program under the French Revitalization Grant.
The AIM approach was developed by Wendy Maxwell, who has been a Basic French and French emersion teacher for 20 years. Maxwell developed it after studying how people learn languages and created a method of combining vocabulary with gesturing. Hearn says this approach is better than handing students a French-English dictionary and expecting them to translate words, something which she says university students don't even do when studying French until their third or fourth year. Instead, the students learn French through songs and plays and make use of vocabulary they're already familiar with complemented by gestures. The program the AIM initiative uses is called Histoires en Action, and Hearn says it uses an extensive vocabulary by building on students' past experiences.
"The most important thing is that they're constantly speaking French in their French classroom. English is not permitted in the classroom and students are more and more comfortable speaking French because everyone is speaking and gesturing at the same time," Hearn explains. "There are teachers out there who do have children that don't even speak English that well, and they're actually succeeding."
Hearn goes on to say that the approach of teaching children how to speak French first before reading and writing it has seen a lot of success.
"I've noticed in our classes there are students of many different levels and so because all the students are gesturing and speaking at the same time, their comfort level is higher," she says. "They're experiencing a faster fluency more than previous approaches to Basic French all academic levels of students are succeeding in Basic French and they're confident and competent with their French language skills, which is extremely important."
Hearn says the AIM program also helps teachers who need to brush up on their French by providing them with an easy way to reintroduce themselves to the language while the students are learning it as well.
