A St. Albert student is en route to la belle province this weekend to compete in a national French language spelling bee.
Sarah Marklund, a Grade 6 Muriel Martin student, will represent Northern Alberta at the Foundation Paul Gérin-Lajoie Dictée, a spelling competition in Montréal.
The dictée is similar to a spelling bee, but participants spell out a whole passage rather than a single word and write it down rather than spelling aloud, because of some of the complexities in the French language.
“They read the whole thing to you once and then they read it all, one sentence at a time slowly,” explains Marklund.
All students write out the passage at the same time and then a jury judges their submissions to determine the student with the fewest errors. There are also tie-breaking sentences in the event of a tie.
Marklund won the opportunity to represent the Northern Alberta after winning first place against 37 other students. She will be competing against 26 other students from all areas of the country during the event on Sunday.
She said spelling in French offers a whole set of challenges that are different from English.
“There is a lot more things to worry about. There are accents and you have to conjugate a lot of verbs and stuff,” she said.
Despite those challenges, Marklund feels fairly confident about her chances.
“I get pretty nervous about the whole thing sometimes,” she said. “I have studied a lot and I am pretty good at spelling so I think I will be fine.”
The winner of the competition will receive a medal and $2,000 with an assortment of smaller prizes for second and third place.
Marklund said she is also looking forward to other parts of the trip, which includes visits to the city’s biosphere and the century old Notre Dame Basilica.
In addition to the dictée, the Montreal-based foundation focuses on education for young children all over the world, including in developing countries in Africa as well as Haiti.
Paul GĂ©rin-Lajoie is a former QuĂ©bec education minister and was credited with many of the changes to the province’s school system during its Quiet Revolution.
