The case for French in Canada is that speaking the language is advantageous in terms of employment. My daughter in Vancouver, for example, has a job that was only available to her because she's fluent in that language.

How come no one got picky about "cache" for "cachet", is it obscure French?

Vocab aside, you are far from unique in struggling with technical subjects at Uni level, its very common I hear for non private school students, even "Straight A" types, to struggle in year one at Uni with maths, physics etc that private school students have been prepped for. There appears to be a disconnect between where high school expectations end and where Uni standards start, and many kids fall into the gap.

So far FI has been good for my eldest kid (touch wood), she enjoys it, but seems to be pretty smart. I would agree that if you have concerns about your child academically then perhaps FI is not the best path. There have been some issues of course, but the comment earlier about monitoring progress surely applies regardless of what schooling a parent chooses.

We looked at it as an opportunity to try something thats not available elsewhere, with the attitude that if it became a problem we had nothing to lose by changing over at a later time. Perhaps there was a certain amount of looking to the future and the advantage of being bilingual in some jobs, but there was certainly no element of cache about the decision.

My foreign language skills are and always have been pretty woeful I will admit, so it was also an opportunity to give her a grounding in a second language that may have helped me at an early age. Its kind of nice to hear her teaching her little sister french songs on road trips, or reading french stories (as well as english), and she seems to be doing well in all subjects. I think the school here has done a good job of balancing French and English loads throughout though, I would not be so keen if it was true sink or swim immersion.

What I mean is you can be good at chemistry, understand the concepts etc, but not know the words for things. Not knowing the word for beaker doesnt mean you dont know your chemistry, it just means you havent learned a particular word yet.

The bigger issue is thousands of bright kids head off to Waterloo university and have a torrid first year because high school has not gotten them to the level of understanding that the Uni expects and that private schools prepare their kids too... That's what I've heard anyway, and the experience of friends kids backs it up.

My wife went through French Immersion in BC.

It's very useful when we want to buy a croque monsieur in Paris

I agree with you totally, loads of kids are unprepared & they are coddled too much in high school.

I agree with a lot of this.

Hmm, that's not what I hear (late immersion) so maybe it depends where you are. Again, FI seems to vary by province. As it is I'm not super fussed but I turned down an early FI spot as I wasn't convinced that underneath all the perceived 'cachet' that were was any true advantage to FI (as Oink pointed out). At least not here where no one speaks it.

That's another argument for separation right there.

Some advantages to speaking French are:

- greater enjoyment of France and the rest of the francomonde

- access to a body of literature

- greater ease in mastering other related languages, such as Spanish.

It's a, like, Good Thing.

Whether or FI results in students who can speak French is, I think, questionable but, if you want to broaden your childrens' minds why not try it? They're not going to learn French by accident.

Separation of Vancouver, where she's experiencing the advantage, from what?

I dunno, because there are reasons why FI isn't such a great choice? Kid is still going to learn french at school starting at grade 3 - they all do. It's not as if it's FI or nothing. If she's set on becoming fluent, she can always move somewhere francophone later, when it's her choice. That's what the OH and I did.

In theory we should have been ideal candidates to try out FI - children do pretty well at school and Mrs jimf is fluent in French & German. However, we decided the risk just wasn't worth the marginal future benefit. I doubt the children would "struggle" as such in FI but I suspect their grades would be lower in FI setting than they would otherwise be sticking with teaching in english.

The people I know from various other countries who speak good english didn't go to an english immersion school they just learnt english at school as a foreign language. My brother's wife is French - her friends/relatives who I've met generally spoke good english - again all though learning english as a foreign language. If the interest and will is there it should be perfectly straightforward to learn sufficient of the language without being taught in an immersion setting.

I do understand there is a perception in some areas that the more academically inclined children will gravitate to the FI system, so it's a sort of informal grammar school system. From what I've seen thats not the case in Calgary.

There's a fair bit of snobbery associated with it here. Some parents perceive that it's better because there's less ESL kids never mind that their kid is FSL.

My daughter is taking Italian with some other kids from her school. They do a few hours a week, learn songs, poems etc. I wouldn't be opposed to something like that in the early grades at school for french, or another language.

Not the case here either I think.

Part of our reasoning in trying the kids in FI is that although I did French and German at school, in my case a few lessons a weeks was not enough for it to sink in. Same goes for my canadian educated better half, and shes an ESL teacher by trade, so knows a thing or two about both teaching languages and being immersed in an alien langage/ culture.

French fluency can certainly do no harm in the long term living in Canada, and the old style way of learning didnt work too well for me, not that I was particularly motivated back then.... Rather like emigrating, if you dont give it a go, then you will never know one way or the other...only in the case of FI, its a lot less hassle to take an alternate path if it turns out to have been a bad decision!

ESL? FSL?