Basically The federal government of Canada has cut $17 million in funding for adult ESL training in the province of British Columbia (B.C.), specifically funding delivered through public colleges. Background There is a bit of blurriness around the jurisdiction of adult ESL training. T
Films and languages from around the world The Vancouver International Film Festival is here! From September 25th to October 10th, the festival invites us into lives and worlds beyond our city in the rainforest. Many of these lives and worlds come in other languages, giving us the perf
Urban adventuring is my favourite kind of day trip I leave for China in about two weeks (!), and it’ll be my biggest trip in three years. Three years without a major trip feels like a long time, but in the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed a different kind of travel: the urban m
Why don’t I speak French? When I travel and people find out I’m Canadian, I often get asked if I speak French. And when I say no, I’m often met with disbelief or puzzlement. How can you not speak French?—it’s a official language of your country! How can I not speak French? IR
One Family, Two Cultures In a perfect world we would be able to balance our time evenly between Mexico and Canada, and we hope to achieve this in the next few years to ensure that our daughter continues to feel influenced by both languages and both cultures. This past weekend marked t
Is French Immersion a good choice for our family? The other day we went to register our daughter for Kindergarten. This is a big deal, she’s growing up so fast! We also attended an Information session about French Immersion with the Vancouver School Board where parents expressed
This post is inspired by my recent trip to Quebec, a province that intimidates me (it feels like a foreign country) and also stimulates me to live up to the bilingual potential of my Canadian identity. 1. French is the sole provincial official language in Quebec. “6,102,210 people (78
This is Toronto We had been talking about our family trip for a while, and our daughter was getting excited to go to Toronto, the city that I grew up in. We pulled her out of bed at 4:30 am and jumped into the taxi. She was smiling from ear to ear as we drove to the airport, wearing h
