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The Two-Way Bilingual Education Immersion Program is a K-5 French/English program which will eventually go through grade 8. This project is a consortium of two school districts, Madawaska and MSAD #24 (Van Buren, Hamlin and Cyr Plantation) of the St. John Valley, which borders French New Brunswick, Canada. It is an additive bilingual program, meaning that all students learn a second language without compromising their first language. This is the only program of its kind in Maine.
Between these two school districts, there are eight bilingual classes involving a total of about 300 students. This represents one-third of the student population of Madawaska and one-half of the student population of Van Buren.
Students in L'Acadien du Haut St-Jean develop fluency and literacy in two languages (French and English), achieve proficiency in all academic subjects while meeting or exceeding district standards, cultivate an understanding and appreciation of other cultures, and develop positive attitudes toward fellow students, their families and their community.
Curriculum and Instruction
Emphasis on French instruction in the early grades allows English-speakers ample exposure to the target language- French. French-speakers have the opportunity to expand their vocabulary and build a strong base in their first language, enabling them to be more successful as they begin to acquire English orally, and later as they transfer reading and writing skills into English. Emphasis on English increases after fourth grade.
Two-way bilingual education immersion is a rigorous academic program in which French and English are used as the vehicle of instruction and not taught simply as a subject. Thematic units integrate the curriculum, making the languages more meaningful to the students, and providing them with enough exposure to practice, use and extend their vocabulary.
Teachers engage students in active participatory activities requiring responses in the language of instruction, be it the native or second language for the student. Hands-on classroom projects provide additional opportunities for students to use their second language. Teachers use a reciprocal-interactive approach and cooperative learning techniques to encourage students to interact with one another in their second language. Students who are native speakers of French and of English are together in the same class. They are instructed in either French or English. The languages are always kept separate for instruction.
Teachers do not use translation for comprehension. Instead, they use a multitude of second language acquisition techniques to make language and content understandable for all students. Students are provided with opportunities to assist and learn from one another, allowing second language acquisition to occur naturally.
Teachers establish an environment where students must use the target language to meet real-life needs. This approach develops language skills through hands-on classroom experiences. Students more readily attach vocabulary to an activity in a hands-on or experiential setting. During the summer, the program sponsors a French immersion camp for students grades K-6.
Staff and Staff Development
All two-way language immersion instructors are bilingual teachers with native-like fluency in French/English. Resource teachers and instructional aides also provide support. Teachers serve on the district's Curriculum Design Team to ensure alignment of the curriculum to what is mandated by the district. Ongoing training for all staff is provided by office personnel, outside trainers, and by the district's staff development team. Staff participates in courses, workshops, and on-site visits to other immersion programs. A custom-designed class in ESL is offered --through distance learning--by the University of Southern Maine. Summer institutes are offered with the collaboration of the New Brunswick French immersion teachers or through the University of Maine.
Parent Participation
Parental involvement is an integral part of the L'Acadien du Haut St-Jean program. It is not only a bilingual school, it's a bilingual community!
Parents are encouraged to volunteer in the classroom and to work with their children on language skills at home. Workshops help parents become knowledgeable about the second-language process and to teach them how to support a child's second-language abilities as they increase.
The Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) offers opportunities for parents to contribute to the school program. Planning cultural events, working on fundraisers, and providing information are just a few of the ways that the PAC supports the school.
A regular output of news releases and other newspaper articles has allowed the community ample opportunities to become aware of the program goals and activities.
Program History
The Saint John Valley certainly seems like a bilingual society because people constantly switch back and forth between French and English, often within one sentence. But most Valley school-age kids in Maine now consider English their first language, and French speakers have become the minority in the Valley's public schools. The New Brunswick side of the Valley is largely the opposite.
A generation ago, most children in the St. John Valley entered the school speaking French. Geographical isolation provided a protective barrier for French speakers in the Valley. Then the English-only policy was introduced in the schools, as the outside world encroached through radio and TV; it was like a cultural crowbar that ripped holes in the wall. Students were encouraged to learn English as quickly as possible, even if that meant losing their native language. A 1959 teachers' handbook put out by the Madawaska Teachers Club opened with a stern warning that teachers should ensure English was spoken at all times. "Any teacher violates her trust when she encourages children to speak anything but English at recess, around the playground, before of after school or even away from school," the handbook states. Some teachers went so far as to anglicize their students' names. Clayton Belanger, superintendent of School Administrative District 24 in the Van Buren area, remembers getting caught speaking French at recess when he was a child in a nearby district. The nuns who taught in the public school hit him with a strap. He grew up believing that French was an inferior language. "If someone was English, they definitely were superior," Belanger says. Even in sports, he says, "They were going to beat us because they were English."
A 1992 study by a Professor from the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, found that children in the St. John Valley were rapidly assimilating, losing both their knowledge of the French language and their Acadian identity. "That was like an alarm to us," says Marc Chasse of Fort Kent. Chasse and others formed the Club Francais, which distributes French dictionaries and storybooks and sponsors a French-speaking contest in local high schools. Club members have supported French Masses at a Madawaska church.
Other efforts got under way to revive interest in the Acadian culture. Residents successfully lobbied Congress in 1990 to set up and fund the Maine Acadian Cultural Preservation Commission. A group began restoring a landmark Catholic church in the village of Lille into a cultural center. The annual Acadian Festival in Madawaska now draws as many as 5,000 people.
Consistent with efforts to revive French, two classrooms (one in northern Maine and the other in Quebec City) were among more than 100 classes that participated in partner-class projects through their involvement with the Orillas Multilingual Computer Network. Both classes were composed of upper elementary grade school children. The class in northern Maine was composed of English-speaking students from a Francophone background. Their teacher was interested in his pupils recovering the cultural and linguistic heritage of their parents and grandparents through contact with French speakers in Quebec. The classes exchanged "mystery cultural packages" containing soil samples, photos, and examples of local flora and fauna, individual and class photographs. They also worked in a journalism project that resulted in a bilingual magazine at year's end (for a full description of the project see Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave new schools. New York: St. Martin's Press.)
The Two Way program was initiated in 1995, catering largely to children of Acadian heritage who had either French or English as their native language. The St. John Valley districts received a federal grant from Title VII for $1.18 million to pay for teacher training, materials, and administrative costs between 1995 and 2000.
At the outset, there was some trepidation on the part of the staff, parents, and administrators. Teachers worried that they weren't qualified to teach in French, and they could lose their jobs if they refused. While some parents embraced the program, others feared that it would interfere with other programs in their schools, such as popular multi-grade classes in Frenchville. Parents also questioned whether their children could handle learning two different languages at once. Administrators acknowledged that it might be hard to find teachers as the program expanded to higher grade levels, where teaching would involve more sophisticated vocabulary. Some educators worried that the program would attract only the best students, since some parents were reluctant to enroll children already struggling in school. However, the bilingual program ultimately won enthusiastic backing.
The program reinforces "what I wanted to do in the first place, but I didn't have the support to do," claims a parent who wants her children to maintain French. A school board member says the program is helping to change community attitudes toward the French language. "We've been brought up for a long time to see French as a street language, and not worthy to be taught," he says. "We never learned to read and write it... It was not important enough to have in school... We're seeing a big change in that now. Kids, they just love singing French songs. They just love speaking French. It's like it's become a new fad" (Hoose, S. "French Spoken Proudly Here," Maine Sunday Telegram, Vol. 109, No. 22, December 15, 1996).
The program wants to keep expanding opportunities for bilingualism. An application has been submitted to extend the project into high school and pre-kindergarten, which are areas not served by the present project. In addition, monies have been available to l'Acadien sixth and seventh graders who want to participate in summer immersion courses in Canada.
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