Bemused by my year 8's French teaching!!

Sorry, a superfluous question mark made its way into that rant:

"I can't understand why ".

I am not blaming the primary school teachers at all- they have an excuse not to know French.

It was dd's secondary school teacher who had the ghastly accent - and she is paid to do this one thing so imho has no excuse.

This was the woman who at the end of Yr 8 told dd that she expected the imperfect tense would be too difficult for most of the top set but that dd might just manage to grasp it. (This was at a parents' evening so she couldn't exactly blame the textbooks for this pronouncement; she chose to say it).

I just can't understand if you have as your one job to teach a particular language and you notice yourself that when you take pupils abroad on school trips you can't actually understand what people are saying to you but have to rely on other teachers to interpret, why you wouldn't then try to do something about it?

This is a university town, it has one of the best language departments in the country, there are reasonably priced evening classes by highly qualified teachers for every sort of level.

Has this woman got an excuse. No, she jolly well doesn't!

Agree it gets worse.
DS can neither speak nor understand French.
He just got an A* in a French GCSE speaking and listening exam.
Essentially they are told what the test will be about.
He can "construct" French and he has a phenomenal memory. So he wrote out about 300 words on the subject in question, including good vocab, grammar and use of tenses. Then he memorised it word for word and parroted it out at the test.
In my day [grumpy old woman emoticon] we went into an oral exam and had to have a conversation in French with no forward knowledge of the subject.

It doesn't get better higher up the school ... my dd has an A* at GCSE and an A at AS in French. She cannot conjugate etre present tense but she's learnt lots of vocab and can parrot many little phrases. Demented way of teaching a language but gets them through the hoop that is the exam.

But they haven't had ' lots of good quality exposure in the primary years' - many have had overworked, under-trained primary teachers who are expected to just teach yet another subject that many haven't done anything with since taking GCSE themselves!

So they come to secondary with a bit of vocabulary - usually just lots of nouns, colours, numbers, hopefully with an accent that sounds roughly like French. I know that there are some primary schools doing a fantastic job with MFL - sadly they are not in the area I teach in!

And no, I don't like the way I have to teach languages but unfortunately the textbooks/schemes of work don't really involve enough grammar teaching and there is far too much 'it's all got to be fun' and 'they won't understand grammar'. I love teaching and try and include as much fun, interesting activities as I can but sometimes you just have to do/learn stuff.

My own feeling- and I was educated in a school system where we were expected to learn to speak 2 or 3 modern languages- is that writing and speaking should go together and both should be introduced from the start. And that pupils should be encouraged to read simple books as early as possible.

But I have been shocked by the level and slow pace of French teaching in this country: dd who is in top sets and actually quite bright has supposedly spent 4 years learning the language and still cannot reliably construct a sentence about what she did yesterday or is planning to do tomorrow. And though she now has a native speaker for a teacher, her teacher the first two years was an Englishwoman whose accent you could cut with a knife: it was like a parody of an English accent.