“Bonjour les amis.” “Wie sagt man “mairie” in Deutsch?” “Did you do your math homework last night.” “Hace frio!”
Take but a single step inside the Lycee Francais de New York, particularly in the early morning when our students are just arriving for class, and you will hear a veritable symphony of languages. You will hear French and English, the two languages underpinning all teaching and learning at our school. You are also likely to hear German, Italian, Spanish and Mandarin, and perhaps even Greek and Latin, the six additional languages we offer. And there is a strong chance you will hear Arabic or Russian or Japanese or Farsi too, given the 50 nationalities which make up our deeply cosmopolitan community.
A new language to learn?
The mastery of three or more languages is a defining characteristic of the education we provide at the Lycee Francais, as everyone associated with our school can happily and proudly attest. I was not surprised therefore when someone asked me about something I had tweeted last week, a link to a thought-provoking article published on the edutopia.org website, entitled “Should Coding be the ‘New Language Requirement’?”
“Mr. Lynch,” this person asked. “Do you agree with the authors, 1. that all students today should learn how to code, and 2. that computer programming really can be learned like a foreign language?” “Two times yes,” I replied. “And I would go even further.” As the edutopia blog reminds us, coding is everywhere. For the authors of the article, “programming is the global language, more common than spoken languages like English, Chinese or Spanish…Because of its ubiquity, because it takes the mystery out of technology and because it allows students to control (not just consume) technology”, coding should certainly be taught in schools.
Plurilinguals have an edge
Next came my second yes: figuring out how to code does very much resemble learning how to use a spoken language. Both require mastering a “system…of signs, symbols and rules used to communicate.” And then there is the additional point I made, rooted not so much in scientific evidence as in an educational intuition that plurilingual students may even have an advantage over monolingual students in mastering the basics of coding. The ability to think through the steps need for solving a problem is a linguistic aptitude that can only help in the field of computer science.
If these affirmations are rather abstract for the moment, we will soon have an opportunity to test them for ourselves. Indeed, the Lycee Français de New York will be participating for the first time this year in an initiative called the “hour of code” organized each winter throughout the United States. Full details will follow soon, but please note that during the week of December 9-15 our technology integrators will be exploring the world of programming in all of our computer classes from first through seventh grade. It might still be a while before we hear early morning discussions related to html, css, java and python. Yet when that day does come, these languages will definitely not seem out of place!
About the Author :
Sean Lynch was Head of School at the Lycée Français de New York from 2011 to 2018, after having spent 15 years at another French bilingual school outside of Paris: the Lycée International de St. Germain-en-Laye. Holding both French and American nationalities, educated in France (Sciences Po Paris) and the United States (Yale), and as the proud husband of a French-American spouse and father of two French-American daughters, Sean Lynch has spent his entire professional and personal life at the junction between the languages, cultures and educational systems of France and the United States. In addition to being passionate about education, he loves everything related to the mountains, particularly the Parc National du Mercantour.