In December, Millie Jacoby, a 21-year-old British student, had a videoconference with Pierrette, her “French grandmother”, for the first time. “She is 91, loves to knit, wrote the young woman on the social network Twitter – the message has been shared nearly 17,000 times. At the end, she asked me: “Haven’t I bored you too much? Do you want to call back next week? ” “
Millie Jacoby is one of the fifty students from the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) who converse every week with elderly people living in France, in order to improve their command of the French language. This program, called ShareAmi and developed by the French association Oldyssey, was created in 2020. “It all started with a double observation during the first confinement: the isolation of the elderly who no longer had visits and that of the British students who could no longer travel and practice French”, says Juliette Neyran, the co-founder of the program.
Since then, more than 145 duets have been created on the basis of shared interests, almost half of them composed of students from Warwick. The program is booming: since May 2020, the association has received 550 registration requests from seniors. While 7,700 students (young people studying French abroad, or in France) are on the waiting list to participate.
Isabel, 20, in her second year of a French and Chinese license at Warwick, has been participating in the program since its inception. Her Alsatian godmother, Marie-Christine, corrects her if she makes mistakes, helps her progress. Although Marie-Christine speaks English “Very correct”, and she lived in the United States in particular, this former director of an engineering school in Strasbourg hardly speaks Shakespeare’s language with Isabel: “95% of our conversations are in French, I even discover new words with her! “
“Our exchanges are fluid”
This more relaxed and informal learning than at university appeals to Eliott, also a student at Warwick. Currently confined to his parents in Kent, in the south of England, he has “No opportunity to speak French”. For the past five months, he has been chatting every week with Jacqueline, his 96-year-old godmother. “Even if we only speak for about 30 minutes because she is tired, our exchanges are fluid. And she is less severe on my syntax than my teacher ”, enthuses the 20-year-old student.
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