Wilbert's onSite experience

"School of Languages" This is the building where my classes were at.

My class looks like this. it is specifically designed like a u-shape so that we can all see each other and work on French together.

This program was designed to help people develop better communication skills in French. They have levels from being completely beginner to bilingual. To tell what level a person is in, we had to wear a bracelet. The bracelets look like this:

Blue is beginner, red is intermediate and yellow are advance/superior levels.

We had to wear it at all times, so that other people can identify how good our French is. The French program was very intensive, yet at the same time very enjoyable. I had to take two classes. One was French grammar (worth 5 university credits) and the other is French pronunciation (worth 1 university credit). Each day, I would wake up around 630AM, do devos/ eat breakfast and I would take the 746AM bus to the University. Classes will start around 830 and end at 1230. I have made a group of friends and we would hang out in one of the cafeterias to eat lunch. Now at the campus, we are strongly encouraged to speak French all the time. If a professor sees us speaking French, we would get a card like this:

We take these cards and put them in an envelope. Each week, the animateurs (AKA student leaders) would count how many cards a class has, and the class that has the most for that week gets a “coffee break”. In addition, a couple of days ago, the animateurs counted who had the most orange cards. I came out third in my class, so I got a little prize.

Now there is also punishment for speaking in English (or any other language), and that consists of a white card:

Basically, you get send to an office and you have to tell a counselor why you didn’t speak French.

On campus, we are also encouraged to take part in many activities.

The animateurs had a list of activities that we could sign up for. I went to almost all the movies and a few excursions.

In the coming days, I will start posting up the pictures from my excursions on facebook and flickr. I wish I had more time to do more of the activities, but I was busy working on French homework.
If you scroll down the page, you would see the pictures of my host’s home. But I know that most of you haven’t seen who I lived with so here is a picture.

My host is the older woman that you see in this picture. Her name is Lise and for the next while I will be staying at her house. All the males that you see in this picture are my housemates, I have 4 housemates who lived in different areas of the house.

Breakfast and dinner are provided in the off campus living plan that I signed up for. So our host would cook dinners for us everyday. Mealtimes are a great experience for me, because we get to really practice our French speaking and listening. Our host will also take us to tourist sites and different cultural places. The people who I lived with here are very warm and friendly.

The funny thing that I realized was that apparently our government has a program where if you are a Canadian citizen, and a fulltime student at a university, they cover all the costs of attending a spring or summer FLE program. It is called the explorer program. You take a look at it here: http://www.jexplore.ca/english/index.html. The only catch is that winning this bursary is by random draw, and you might not get to go where you want to because there are many universities that accept explorer students. Just to give you an example of how cool this program is, two of my housemates are explorer students and they get $245 to spend on meals or whatever they want. It is a neat program; check it out if you are interested in learning French.