Edmonton Journal du lieu suivant : Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 18

BC8T OOPY AVAILABLE Do you have any comments on today's Life features? Please call the Life Connection at 944-0600, press 1, 944-0600 04, and leave a recorded message. We'i publish your comments occasionally in the Life section. EDITOR: Barb Wilkinson. 429-5290 nnfoinjiifo Make an appointment and There's more than one way to learn Norwegian, Arabic, Latin or Russian v. i 1 I- ''vV they'll call nT'.

J-" 4 you Steve Simon The Journal guage lesson since that fateful day in 1962 when Senora Escobar caught me playing Kingston Trio records in the language lab instead of following the adventures of Juan and Pablo in their real Chevrolet without a back seat. In my 25 minutes with Lalou at the dial, I established Je ne suis pas Francais but would like to take my secretaire couter la tnusique in New York at a charmant petit joint called I'Entrecote. I dont know what happens in lesson two, but it's got to beat hanging out with Pablo and Juan and their funny car. and Steven King novels such as Pet Semetary are fiction to be surebut they are just more examples of the clash of cultural images surrounding childhood. Patricia Rooke, a historian at the University of Alberta, says there are four characteristics of childhood: dependence, segregation, protection and the delay of adult responsibility.

One problem with childhood today, says Rooke, is that it lasts too long. She's concerned that adolescents, with all their brains, energy and potential, serve no real function in Western society. This is everyone's loss. In addition, with the economy being what it is. some young people are delaying adult responsibilities jobs or running a home well into their 20s.

Representvig Children is a place to discuss these issues. This is not an academic exercise; the forum is geared towards public participation. And it's free. i I leams one phrase: Je ne suis pas Francais Stories by BILL SASS Journal Staff Writer Edmonton all tell our kids the same thing about learning a second language. "Learn a second language and employment doors will open before you.

"Learn French and become prime minister of this great land. "A second language exercises the brain and makes you smarter." And the kids listen, of course. Yeah. Right. Just like we did.

Personally, my high school years were spent trying to get a grip on basic English, never mind a disastrous flirtation with Grade 10 Spanish which brought my already anemic grade point average to the square root of squat. "Hola, Juan." "Hola, Pablo." That's all I remember that and the name of the text: El Camino Real. That means, as near as I can figure, 'the real Chevrolet without a back seat." Strange name for a Spanish book. Anyway, my tin ear for language has kept me out of Quebec jour nalism, Canadian politics, the Bario and Mensa for 47 years. It was with great interest, then, that I read a small ad in the March Atlantic Monthly magazine for something called "Dial-A-Language." I dialed the 1-800 number on the ad and was put in touch with the principal himself, Michael Lalou, graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure de St.

Cloud (Centiv de Recherche) Paris. What would it be like, I mused, to graduate from a school whose name I couldn't pronounce? Lalou, in New York, said he'd send me the Dial-A-Language bumph and we'd talk again, and he'd give me a free French lesson as an example. The bumph included glowing personal endorsements of the by-phone lessons, which caused me to dust off some long-forgotten reporter-type skills to track down. I checked two of them and found them to be 13 to 20 years old and. originally, for an outfit called Phone Lab, an earlier bought a baby card recently, just because it was irresistible.

On the front of the card i 1 in is a photo of a dark-haired infant boy who is laying on his stomach in a blue sleeper. He has diaper bum: you know, that big, double-diapered rear end that sticks up in the air, all safe and swaddled and just begging to be given a snugly pat Images of childhood flood our culture, many of them at odds. We have sentimental cards of sleeping babies and lisping TV tots with "taste bugs" who sell yogurt Then there is the concept of the latchkey child; you can enrol your child in a course to help him cope with being alone after school. We read about 11-year olds who steal cars or. We hear myths about kids who charge parents with child abuse if they are so much as grounded.

There is the hurried child and the hyperactive child and the angry child. Who are these children? And what do they say about the culture that created them? A public forum at the University of Alberta today is asking some of these questions. It called Representing Children i Learning another language is a bit like buying a new car. First you have to decide what kind of car you want and then you've got to shop around for the best deal. Phyllis Schneider, assistant professor of speech pathology at the University of Alberta, said she would likely put her money into a good, small class.

But she is intrigued with the concept of over-the-phone language instruction. "The current idea is conversation rather than drill." A phone course might offer that. "It's something you don't have with tapes and cassettes." A classroom setting, however, can offer students a shared context of events to talk about she said. In light of that, here are some of the classrooms opened for the language business this spring and summer. IN THE CLASSROOM Edmonton Public Schools Continuing Education: A wide range of languages offered from French and Spanish to Arabic, to Oriental, Norwegian and Latin.

$119 for 25 hours of class. Call 496-1100. Edmonton Catholic Schools Continuing Education: Offer French, German and Spanish. Courses are 18-to-25 hours and run about $120. Call 944 2010.

Alberta College: The college focuses on high school French 10, 20 and 30 for first-timers. The 70-minute classes run four days a week for five months and cost $200 for those over 20 and $110 for the younger set. There's also an intensive course for people wanting to run as president of France. It's five hours a day, five days a week for five months. $723.

Call 428-1851. University of Alberta Faculty of Extension: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, Japanese and Chinese are on the menu. Three-to-four months, once or twice a week. $115 $185. Call 492-3116.

Concordia College: Concordia has started fall non-credit language programs, but this year's planning is still up in the air. However, there are a few short courses in "Language for the Traveller" being offered this in April and May. Most of it centres on phraseology so travelers can find meals and bathrooms and the like. The languages: Spanish, Japanese and Italian. The courses run 10 hours over five weeks and cost $75.

Call 466-6633. Grant MacEwan Community College: These are real credit courses, but might be considered an option for people wanting to transfer a course to the of A. They can be taken as individual courses. French 101 is three hours a day for about six weeks. $250.

German 100 goes four hours a day for the six weeks. Cost $550. Call 497-5000. ON THE PHONE Dial-A-Language. This is a New York based company with a 20-year-old program of teaching languages over the phone.

It's one-on-one and interactive. The instructors phone you at whatever time you want for the 25-minute lesson. Each lesson costs $38 US. For information, call 1-800-222-7544 ON THE BOOM BOX Audio-Forum Of Gilford. Connecticut For about $175 (that's an average) you'll get 10-12 cassette tapes and a text book to cover 80-to-100 hours of self-instruction in one of 94 languages, which include the Creole version of French.

Vietnamese and Swahili. 1-800 243 1234. Berlitz Language Centres: Established in 1878, this is the biggest name in commercial language instruction. Self instruction in French. Japanese, Italian, German and Spanish are available on cassettes or CDs.

Private language instruction at various costs can be arranged. 1-80O387-4776. In his first 25-minute French lesson incarnation of Dial-A-Language. Barry Farber of WOR Radio in New York, now with WABC Daynet, took classes 20 years ago and swears by the system and Lalou. It worked so well that Farber is now president of the New York Language Club, an organization where aspiring polyglots can meet to practise pronouncing the names of foreign schools.

"There's lots of places to learn a language, but no place to practise it." Which is probably why my kids, victims of many years of classroom French, have yet to Who are these children? over the phone, reporter Bill Sass order their first heart-stopping plate of poutine (fries, gravy and cheese) in the language of the Chomps Elsie and Loover Art Place. Lee Steedle knows Lalou's methods as well and used his phone-in Spanish to market Reader's Digest to South American and Spanish customers before he retired eight years ago. "I was behind the learning curve pretty old when I started, but I got to the point where I could give a slide presentation in Latin America without notes." Lianne Faulder changed since then. But today, there seems to be no coherent culture, no uniform point of view to promote. So children become political footballs.

We punt them back and forth as if they were NovAtel or the Oilers. Ralph Klein wants to promote Alberta as a great business investment because of our low taxes? Suddenly, there's no money available for full kindergarten because, after all, there's no evidence children benefit from it Balanced budget by 1996? Suddenly, parents must take More Responsibility for children and coincidentally, it's becoming tougher for children il I Life He liked the phone method because he could take the lessons whenever he wanted them you set up the appointments and they call you for the 25-minute session. In both Farber's and Steedle's cases, their companies paid for the not-inexpensive lessons which, now, range from $456 to $4,000, depending on the language and course length. Lalou said 80 per cent of his students are employer-sponsored. Well, I could put it off no longer.

It was time for my first lan iT-'j- "M'i 1 i running from abusive homes to get financial help from social services. Children have become a commodity in this culture and the agenda of childhood changes depending on the market There are many signs of this: look at the Club Monaco ads which feature rre-pubes-cent girls and boys and hard sell of their emerging sexuality. Witness new movies like Blank Cheque, in which the children are valued only if they make money to supplement their allowance. Another popular culture image of children is the child-as-monster Dennis the Menace and features panel discussions by some of the city's most thoughtful advocates for children. (Interestingly, there are no children on any panels, which says a lot about the place of youngsters in today's culture.

Adornments, perhaps, or symbols of their parents' achievements. But panelists with a point of view? Maybe next year.) Childhood as a stage of life is a relatively recent phenomena, arising in Europe some 200 years ago and coinciding with the emergence of a more powerful middle class. "Middle-class children were represented as a kind of agent of revolutionary change," says Gary Kelly, an English professor at the University of Alberta and one of the conference organizers. As families became smaller, it became more important to pass on values (if progeny were limited) to promote the culture. Children were one way to invest in the future.

I'm not sure if much has.