De l'importance de communiquer

 

 

 

""In McLean’s 1992 book about small town Canada, Welcome Home, English and French Canada don’t always seem to know much about each other. One example is the Quebecer who has never heard of French Immersion. I ask McLean, who travels across Canada for the Vinyl Café: Have things improved since then? “I suspect that Canadians are more tolerant, more accepting of each other,” he replies, “but it’s time for us to go the next step.” As he put it in his broadcast, “we haven’t been successful with our sense of each other. We have been tolerant and… accommodating too, but we haven’t said that they are also us.

 

We haven’t embraced the most fundamental truth about us: that they are us, and we are them.”

 

It’s the old Martin Buber idea, “I am thou,” he tells me.

 

McLean grew up in the very English-speaking suburb of West Montréal. “I learned the basics of French at school, but it’s when I spent the summer working on a construction site where I was the only “Anglo” within 50 miles that, for the first time... I understood what it meant to communicate in another language.” Looking back on that experience, he says: “I think I learned not to be shy—I could make errors, be inarticulate. I learned that I could communicate with my high school French.”"

 

Intégral : http://www.ocol.gc.ca/newsletter_cyberbulletin/mclean_e.htm