As a member of the MLF (Mission Laïque Française), LILA is part of a network of schools worldwide that strives to advance French secular education.  A few years ago, the MLF, with 17 member schools in the US, established a full-time coordinator to help set up pedagogical projects and training for the member schools.  Philippe Vanhille, our new Los Feliz campus director, was the pilot trainer and it is through this program that LILA got to know him.  LILA is an active participant in the regional training program. Last year, for example, the school loaned Julie Higounet, our Pedagogical Director, to other member schools to run workshops for their teachers.  This year, the MLF has expanded its project and Julie has a ¼ time position with the MLF to continue training other schools.

The MLF network schools chose Oral communication as the common project for all MLF schools.  This is relevant to LILA because the reality that students always have stronger skills in comprehension and that they do not all produce language at native levels is very present in all immersion programs.  Research findings clearly back this up.

A training program that adopted the work of the renowned pedagogical linguist Philippe Boisseau and his “albums echos” was launched.  The idea is that students enter reading after they have first learned to talk.  Written text is available to a child because oral communication systems are understood.  Therefore, mastering oral skills is key to being able to learn how to read.  The better a child speaks, the faster he will learn how to read. The program targets vocabulary building and grammatical acquisition of the language structures.

After a year of putting the program in place, we decided to invite Philippe Boisseau to come run a seminar and further the program by working with our teachers and seeing how they were doing.  Philippe Boisseau spent four days with us in Pine Summit this August and it felt as if we had a real celebrity amongst us.  The training went so well with the Cycle 1/2 (Preschool, Pre-K, and K) teachers that he has already agreed to come back next year to work with another group.

In the meantime, it is important for us to assess how well the program is helping our students.  Therefore, Julie Higounet has set up an evaluation system to track the individual progress of each student.  Three times a year, LILA pedagogical trainers Julie Higounet and Batiste Genestin together with the help of Pre-Kindergarten teachers will take students one-on -one to orally assess how the students are evolving and acquiring certain vocabulary and language structures.  The teachers will use the results to help adapt the program throughout the year but, ultimately, at the end of the year, the three tests will help us improve the way we teach oral communication and test whether or not the new program has succeeded in helping us increase student performance both on an individual basis and school-wide.  This is not a standardized test but it is one of the ways we try to ensure that our program does obtain the desired results.  So, do not be surprised when your kindergartener comes back home and says people came to talk to him today!