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Vanier College leads initiative to help nursing students pass French exams

Karen Seidman
The Gazette
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Vanier College is working on an innovative new program to help CÉGEP nursing students pass the French proficiency exam they need to be able to practice in Quebec.
The St. Laurent college received a $122,000 grant to develop the program, which is designed to help students who didn’t go to high school in Quebec. Those who did go to high school in Quebec are exempt from writing the exam. It will be an on-line program designed to complement the French courses the students already take, but which don’t always adequately prepare them for the proficiency exam.
The proficiency exam is given by the Office de la Langue Française and many students have difficulty passing it.
“There are a lot of allophone students and immigrants in nursing who find it difficult to pass the exam,” said Eric Lozowy, co-ordinator of Vanier’s French department. “We are trying to develop pedagogical material to improve their French proficiency and help them pass the exam.”
He said many students who come into the nursing program are older and have difficulty mastering a new language.
“We just want to provide them with more tools to pass,” he said.
Although the project is Vanier’s initiative, French teachers from Dawson College and John Abbott College are also working on developing the new material for the Centre Collégial de Développement de Matériel Pédagogique.
Catherine Duranleau, a French teacher at Vanier who is working on the project, said the team did surveys to better understand the needs of students who are trying to pass the exam.
Surprisingly, she said, the OLF doesn’t have statistics on how many fail the French proficiency exam.
But she said the on-line activities designed for nursing students will be very useful to many students, not just those who are recent immigrants to Quebec.
“There are many who pass the exam but still aren’t strong in French,” said Duranleau.
Yung Truong, co-ordinator of the project, said even students who are exempt from the exam can benefit because it will help familiarize them with the medical vocabulary they need.
The new program, which may be up and running as soon as next semester, will be a real help to the college’s 250 nursing students, said Helen Babouras, academic co-ordinator of the nursing department at Vanier.
“Many students have been in Canada less than five years but they are very motivated and want to communicate well,” said Babouras. “Even students who speak French will benefit because the medical terminology is different in French.”
Shane Ward is a second-year nursing student at Vanier who has been living in Quebec about eight years. She moved here from Ontario but plans to stay in Quebec and needs to pass the OLF exam.
“If I’m conversing with patients in French, I can’t be as confident as I am in English,” said Ward. “Most French courses don’t help with medical vocabulary and aren’t geared to conversational French. So this is a really good idea.”