A TALE OF TWO KINDERGARTENS, by guest blogger Francie Gow

About a month after I began French-immersion Kindergarten, my Dutch grandmother died, and my mother brought me and my sister Emily to the Netherlands to spend two months with Opa. While we were there, the grownups decided to send me for part of that time (two or three weeks, perhaps) to the local school. The teacher graciously accepted me as a guest in her classroom and asked the other students to make me feel welcome. 

I have no memory whatsoever of my first month in the French Kindergarten. I presume that we were all taught the phrase “Puis-je aller aux toilettes?” (May I go to the bathroom?) on day one. We were all Anglophones, so although the teacher never used any English with us, I know that she would have used very simple sentences, lots of repetition, and plenty of contextual clues to help us along.

I do, however, have a vivid first-person recollection of parts of my Dutch experience, perhaps because it was so overwhelming. I remember an enormous sense of frustration at not understanding what was going on around me. The adults spoke to me in English and to each other in Dutch. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole in a Dutch that I could not hope to follow, as of course she was aiming it at native speakers, and then she would give me a brief explanation in English so that I could join in the activity. My classmates spoke to each other in Dutch, and to me in slower Dutch accompanied by gestures.

Had I stayed longer, I would have eventually cracked the code and become quite fluent, progressing much faster than I later did in French. I did acquire a large stock of vocabulary words over those two months, mostly related to food, a topic that came up several times a day. However, with the exception of “Ik ben Francie” (I am Francie), which was printed on one of my t-shirts, I never learned to produce a single sentence.

Because the adults were continuing to speak to me in English, no doubt at my insistence and because it was easier, I had no way to pick up verbs, an essential building block for meaningful communication. Therefore, even as my vocabulary grew, I never felt any closer to being able to speak when the time came to return home.

Of course, we all knew that the trip was temporary, so while the grownups no doubt hoped that I would benefit from the exposure to an extent, learning the language was not the primary purpose of my time there. It may have been different if we knew that I would be staying. I imagine that simple story books, read to me repeatedly by patient adults, would have granted me the entry into sentences that I so badly needed to be able to burst through the wall of incomprehension. A strong desire to make friends with my non-English-speaking classmates would have pushed me from there.

While I don’t remember my first days of Kindergarten, I do remember the first days of my return to the French-language classroom in December. In theory, French should have been even less comprehensible to me than Dutch, as there had been no previous exposure to French in my home. However, my only memories of the rest of Kindergarten relate to my classmates and the things we did. I remember learning that I could use the black crayon to make grey by pressing lightly instead of hard. I remember tossing beanbags through holes in a wooden board with a clown painted on it. I remember counting to one hundred. I remember building structures with blocks and pasting macaroni to construction paper. I remember singing songs. I do not remember the fact that I was doing all of this in French.

I recently asked my mother what she remembered from my Kindergarten experience. She told me that a friend of hers had once asked me whether I had learned any French at school that day and was surprised when I replied, “No.” But wasn’t I in French immersion? I looked at her as though she had just said something nonsensical. “We don’t learn French at school,” I explained, “we just speak it.”