Photo: Peter Walsh/Telegraph-Journal

I am an Anglophone student in my 5th year at the University of Moncton and I only started learning French in Grade 6.  Today, everyone tells me that I speak like a real Acadian.  They don’t understand how I manage so well in my second language when I was raised in a purely Anglophone environment.

I think that I really started to learn the French language in depth at the University of Moncton.  The high school immersion program gave me a strong enough base to understand spoken French (I could understand my profs at university!), but that program isn’t exactly immersion because when you leave your only French class of the day, you always speak English with your friends, your other teachers, and your family.  I remember how, in my first weeks of university, I was totally surrounded by French the moment I got on campus.

But my transition from an English school to the University of Moncton wasn't done on my own.  I had an excellent French professor who helped me by correcting my writing and by answering my thousands of banal questions about the French language!  My classmates and all my other professors helped me a lot as well.  When I didn’t understand an expression or a word in French, I would just have to make a confused face to get an explanation.

I am happy to have been in French immersion in high school, but I am even happier to have continued learning French throughout my postsecondary studies.  I feel like the Acadian culture has welcomed me and, consequently, that I am more open, as a person, to different cultures.


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To read the Telegraph Journal's article about Jenna, click here!