Studying at a bilingual university in Canada

Short answer first: at the University of Ottawa you may hand in written work and answer exam questions in English or French whatever language the course is taught in, and McGill's policy says the same thing in Quebec. Glendon is York University's bilingual campus in Toronto, and it does not require both languages to get in. Outside Quebec you can take a whole degree in French at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick, which runs 165 programs across three campuses, or at the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg. Ontario counts ten French-language and bilingual institutions offering university programs.

Every rule below comes from the institution's own page or from a provincial government. Your faculty will differ on the details, and the details are in your academic regulations, so read those as well as this.

What does a bilingual university actually give you?

Not a promise that every class runs twice. A bilingual Canadian university gives you three things: courses taught in both languages, student services in both, and a written right to be assessed in the one you choose. The Government of Ontario counts ten French-language and bilingual institutions offering university programs in the province, alongside two publicly funded French-language colleges, and says the point is that you can pursue postsecondary studies entirely in French while also learning the specialized vocabulary of your field in English. That last clause is the honest part. Even in a French program, the terminology of your discipline will reach you in English sooner or later.

The shift from a high school where one language did all the work is the same shift described in from high school to first year in Canada, with a second problem stacked on top.

• Bilingual does not mean every course is offered twice. Some courses have an English section and a French section, some have one section in one language, and some are taught bilingually. The timetable decides your year, not the brochure.
• The right to be assessed applies to you, not to the course. The language of instruction can be English while your exam answer is in French. That is the whole design.
• Services follow the designation. At a designated institution you can expect advising, the registrar and student support in both languages, which matters more in February than it does in September.

What exactly is your right in class?

The University of Ottawa puts it in one sentence. Its own statement is that except in programs and courses for which language is a requirement, all students have the right to produce their written work and to answer examination questions in the official language of their choice, regardless of the course's language of instruction. Read the exception before you celebrate the rule. A French as a second language course cannot be answered in English, a German course cannot be answered in French, and a translation course tests the very thing you would be trying to avoid.

The University's Regulation on Bilingualism adds that the faculties shall provide professors with the support needed to comply with students' language rights, particularly for marking assignments and exams submitted in the other official language. That is the part students forget to rely on. Your professor being more comfortable in English is not a reason for you to write your midterm in English if French is the language you think in.

Quebec works the other way round and arrives at the same place. McGill's School of Social Work states that the language of instruction for most courses at McGill University is English and that students may make arrangements to write term papers, examinations and theses in English or in French, except in courses where knowledge of the language is one of the objectives of the course. The phrase "make arrangements" is doing work there. Tell the instructor in the first two weeks, not the night before the paper is due, and put it in writing.

How does the University of Ottawa's immersion stream work?

Immersion is the structured version of what most bilingual students do badly on their own. You register in the stream alongside your degree, you take part of your program in French, and you get taught the French of your own subject rather than French in general. The university says the stream is offered in more than 85 programs, comes with grades that protect your average while you work in the weaker language, and ends in an official French immersion diploma.

There is money attached. Telfer's own students describe scholarships of 1,000 dollars yearly for meeting the minimum requirements, and a companion arrangement where a student registered in a required management course may take a matching French course worth 3 credits that counts as an out-of-faculty elective. Check the amounts and the eligibility on your own faculty's page for 2026/27 before you plan around them, because both move.

Before you register in the stream

1. List every required course in your program and mark which ones have a French section.
2. Check whether the French section runs in the same term, or only in alternate years.
3. Find the companion language course for each one, and see whether it counts as an elective or as an extra.
4. Ask the academic adviser what the grade protection actually does to your transcript.
5. Work out the credit total per term. Immersion adds courses, and a 15-credit term does not become a 15-credit term because you wanted it to.

What is Glendon, and who is it for?

Glendon is York University's bilingual campus, described as Toronto's only bilingual university campus, a small campus inside a large university where you study in English, French or both. The entry condition is the one students get wrong: knowledge of both languages is not an admission requirement for most programs, provided you are proficient in one of them. You are not expected to arrive bilingual. You are expected to leave that way, because the degree carries a language requirement you satisfy through courses in your weaker official language.

That design suits two people. One is an anglophone from Ontario with French from school who wants to work in both languages and will not get there by taking one elective a year. The other is a francophone from outside Quebec who wants to keep studying in French in a city where that is otherwise hard.

Where can you study entirely in French outside Quebec?

Two places stand out, for different reasons. The Université de Moncton calls itself Canada's largest French-language university outside Quebec, with campuses in the francophone regions of New Brunswick at Moncton, Edmundston and Shippagan, 165 study programs including 40 at master's and doctorate level, and more than 53,000 degrees awarded since it was created in 1963. New Brunswick is the country's officially bilingual province, and the university is the reason a francophone New Brunswicker does not have to leave home to study in French.

In Manitoba the answer is the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, which teaches about 1,700 students with an average class size of 20, 17 per cent of them international, across collegiate diplomas, bachelor's and master's degrees and continuing education, all in French. It is a small institution inside an English-majority province, which changes daily life more than it changes the degree. Your classes, your assignments and your friends are in French. Your part-time job, your landlord and the specialist textbook for third year are probably in English.

What happens when the lecture, the slides and the book are in different languages?

This is the ordinary case, not the edge case. The professor lectures in French, the slides carry English terminology because the software or the textbook does, and the assigned reading is an English article nobody has translated. Three languages of input for one idea, and you have 50 minutes.

The research says the cost is real. A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology assessed 63 undergraduates on literacy, language, cognitive and note-taking measures and found that students working in their first language produced notes of higher quality than students working in their second, with first language the strongest single predictor of note quality, ahead of word reading fluency. The study was run in Hebrew and Arabic, not French and English, so treat it as the shape of the problem rather than a measurement of your own week. The shape is clear enough: in your second language you write less, you write it slower, and you miss more of what was said.

So stop trying to solve it live.

The two-column page

Decide the language of your notes before the term starts and keep it for the whole course. Then run the page in two columns:

• Left column, your language. Everything you would normally write: the argument, the worked example, the thing the professor said twice.
• Right column, the other language. Only terms, only as they were said, in the form they were said. "Contrainte budgetaire" goes down as "contrainte budgetaire", not as "budget constraint".
• A margin mark for anything you did not catch. A question mark and three words. You are recording where the hole is, not filling it.

Translating a full sentence during a lecture costs you the next two or three minutes of content, which is the real damage. The terms can wait 20 minutes. The argument cannot.

The half hour after the lecture

Within a day, go back and do three things in order: fill the margin marks from the slides or the recording, move every right-column term into the course glossary, and write two sentences at the top saying what the lecture was about. Twenty to thirty minutes, once, while you still remember what the professor meant. Leave it a week and the margin marks become permanent holes.

How do you build a glossary for each course?

One glossary per course, not one per language. It lives in the same file as your notes and it has four columns.

The fourth column is the one people skip and the one that saves you. In April you will not remember whether the professor's definition or the textbook's definition is the one the exam wants, and the two are rarely identical. The source column settles it in five seconds.

Add to it every week, never in a single session in November. Twelve weeks of a course in economics, nursing or law will produce somewhere between 100 and 300 terms, and that is a term list, not a memory problem, until you leave it to the end.

How do you revise vocabulary and content at the same time?

Separately, and then together. The mistake is making one card that asks you to recall a definition and its translation and its application at once. Split them.

• Vocabulary cards are one way and short. French term on the front, meaning on the back, then a second card the other way round. These are cheap to make and fast to review, and they are exactly what spaced repetition was built for.
• Content cards are in the language of the exam. If you will write the final in French, the question and the answer are in French, even if your notes were bilingual. Practising retrieval in the wrong language builds the wrong path.
• Application questions come last. A past exam question, answered in full, in the language you will be assessed in. Two of these a week per course beats 60 cards a night.

Turning a term's notes into cards is mechanical once the glossary exists, which is the point of keeping it as you go rather than mining it later. The method is in turning notes into flashcards.

One practical warning about apps: several note and transcription tools set one language per account or per recording, which breaks on a lecture that switches language mid-sentence, and a bilingual campus produces those weekly. We go through which tools name Canadian French and which do not in the best note-taking app for students in Canada. Test any tool on a real bilingual lecture in your first week, not in week nine.

Where Notibo fits

The weak point in a bilingual term is the lecture you only half caught. Notibo records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards with spaced repetition, so the term you missed in French in week two is still there in week ten. The transcript comes back in the language that was spoken, and it transcribes 89 languages including Canadian English and Canadian French. A bilingual lecture therefore gives you a bilingual transcript, which is what the glossary above wants anyway. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which covers the slide deck and the reading.

Pro is free to try for 14 days with no card, and the trial includes 240 minutes of recording, enough to test it on real lectures in both languages. Afterwards the free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year; prices are in euro and the local amount is shown at checkout, so it is not a Canadian dollar figure. Uploads are capped at 50 MB, and long recordings are saved in smaller parts as they run and joined back into one transcript. Files are stored in the EU on Supabase in Frankfurt, while transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. See the pricing page for what the plans include, and ask your professor before you record anything.