2.2 Rate of transmission of the French language

The rate of transmission of French to children under the age of 18 years in Ontario is of particular interest to us.

Language(s) spoken at home - In endogamous households (in which both parents speak French), 91.6% of the children continue to speak French. In exogamous households in which the mother is Francophone, the retention rate is 34.2%.This rate drops to 14.6%when it is the father who is Francophone (OFA, 2005).

Loss or students - Ontario has 12 French-language school boards. Of every 10 students who begin their studies in French-language schools, four leave French-language schools before the end of secondary school to go to English-language schools (Barkany, 2007).

2.3 Results of the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey

In 2006, Statistics Canada produced a document called The Canadian Component of the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey 2003 (IALSS): The Situation of Official Language Minorities (Corbeil, 2006). It presents and explains the results relating to Francophones between the ages of 16 and 65 of the second international survey. Because the data was amassed from a large number of Francophones in Manitoba, New Brunswick and Ontario, it is safe to say that it fairly represents the reality of Francophones in these provinces.

Key facts of the survey

• In Ontario, 55%of Francophones ranked at level 1 or level 2 in literacy. Level is the lowest and level 5, the highest: Level 3 is considered to be the minimum required to function in our society. On a national scale, 42%of Canadians ranked below level 3.
• One-quarter of the Francophone population in Ontario has considerable difficulty in decoding a text and as a result, cannot understand its core meaning.
• One-third of the Francophone population in Ontario can read well enough to get by in daily life, especially if the texts are written in plain language.
• Only one-tenth of the Francophone population in Ontario can read complex documents. (See figure 1, showing the range of literacy levels among francophones in Ontario, below.)

Overall, Francophones in Ontario have more difficulty reading and understanding written texts than do Anglophones, whether or not their geographic location places them in a majority or minority setting, and whether or not they chose English or French to respond to the survey questionnaire (Wagner et al., cited in FCAF,2007).