Standard of French

Le Petit Nicolas is available online here I'm using it with my home ed group (only 3 kids age 13-16) as a bit of interest in between the GCSE stuff we are doing.

I not read the entire thread, but the teaching of modern foreign languages is an utter disgrace in the UK. With the internet it is easier to communicate with french/ german/ spanish people. We also have lots of immigrants who speak different languages.

My five year old is very interested in learning German. My twelve year old used to be enthuasic about languages when he was young. What are British schools doing to turn children off MFL?

I was sure that I was missing the point . However the bottom line is as far as the DC are involved there is no new easier systematic way to teach them grammar and conjugaison. It is up to the individual teacher to make it interesting. However approach is broadly similar to previously in French schools since 1970s (maybe not to how you were taught French as a MFL).
BTW BLEDs are regarded as the old fashioned drilling type system compared to the more 'modern approach' (modern meaning from 1970s) textes.

summerends - no, it is you who are missing the point. It is the underpinnings of grammar (the theories) that have changed. Of course things like drilling are still used to reinforce learning.

MY DD1 learnt both French and Japanese at school.

Japanese taught very formally - lots of grammar, tenses, alphabets etc
French - in the modern 'conversational' style

DD1 went on to get an A at A-level for Japanese, and still studies it for fun in evening classes at SOAS.
French - she really struggled & got a B at GCSE. She always complained that 'they never explained how it worked'
Interestingly, the school is now dropping German from the syllabus (due to lack of interest from pupils & funds) but keeping Japanese (which continues to be popular, especially with the 'geeky' pupils.

Bonsoir just give me one example, for example sentence structure and conjugaison is taught grouped in the same way to all appearances. Several posts on it would have been simpler if you pointed out at least one aspect of what you find obvious to back up your statement.

Disappointed that gcse teaching does not focus on grammar as how will they cope if they choose to do A level as it will be such a large gap.

I suggest you look a little harder, summerends.

My nieces and nephews have the latest edition, at their different levels, honestly nothing struck me as new when I looked through them.

BLED is updated all the time

Bonsoir the BLEDS have been around for some time, nothing modern about the way they teach grammar and orthographe, just lots of repetition.

summerends - you can just buy the relevant BLED

I was never keen on MFL simply because I had no confidence when speaking, and hated the thought that I could be making a fool of myself. Therefore I gave up French as soon as I was able (post GCSE). I also took Latin and ancient Greek.

At university I ended up studying a modern language to fluency, and have since studied others through distance learning courses. I do really regret not having taken French A-Level though when I was at school.

A friend has children at my old school. I was shocked to learn the eldest doesn't have to do a MFL as she's doing Latin (Classical languages are not the same as a MFL), and the youngest, having done a year of French at junior school, is now, in first year senior, doing both Spanish and German from scratch. Next year he will take up French and drop one of the above, and then another can be dropped in third year for Latin. Am unimpressed to say the least!

Zero so much to read so little time! .
Bonsoir sorry to pursue this but I am still not sure of what you mean by modern grammar methods taught in French schools.
Obviously work set for holidays is revision but as I indicated in my post I have not seen any different way to teach grammar from the normal textes (apart from more lively presentation)
You say your DD is mainly taught on a whiteboard. Do you think these methods are perhaps not transcribed in the standard textes then? If they are could you let me know the name of one? It would be very useful.

My Amazon fr. basket is bulging. Just wish I could transfer it all intravenously to a child ...

Books - there are many of them.

Agree with summerends that Asterix quite complicated due to the puns. I can heartily recommend the Petit Nicolas book though, all available on Amazon.

Stealth the best way we have found to improving reading comprehension for slightly older DCs (who don't need pictures to understand) is to use a Kindle, buy books from Amazon.fr (obviously for French books) at level that is perhaps easier than their first language level. Then make sure there is an appropriate dictionary loaded for when they highlight words they don't understand.
Asterix is brilliant but some of the humour with jeux de mots may be beyond the average English DC

Actually, Bonsoir, you raise an excellent point earlier in the thread. In an effort to increase DS's reading comprehension, I think I shall be investing in some Asterix (he has a beautiful tome of "comtes de fees" ('scuse lack of accents) which was a christening present, but I don't think that's going to appeal in quite the same way). I might even get him to compare some bits with the English ones he has and critique the translation...

wither as in a withering glare, rather than whither as in "whither thou goest I will go", presumably?

oh, I'm being stupid. As it 'wither away'?

Crikey - wither? I'm not sure I know what it means!

loopy - another thing I get cross about in MFL teaching is the insistence on teaching DC literary vocabulary before they have any mastery of everyday/domestic/social vocabulary. The other day a friend's DS was struggling with a short story full of words such as "wither" in a figurative sense. He doesn't even know "wrist" or "elbow" FFS!

It's a bit hit and miss, but Memrise can be very useful for building a good vocabulary base. You create an account, then can either use content that is already there, or create your own.

I was thinking about this earlier, and realised I missed two other factors off my list of differences between the system I have/implement and the normal UK state school model.

These are choice and autonomy.
All of my students choose their languages. They just take two until the age of 14, then can choose to continue both or neither. We often, in the UK, have students who feel they were forced into a language that doesn't suit them, when another might have (this used to be a particularly frustrating phenomenon for those, often boys, who would have suited German but had to prove aptitude in French before being allowed to opt for it.
The second is something that I feel very strongly about. I refuse to stress any of my students. If they don't want to learn, I will not force them. They have to choose to succeed for it to work. Poor results are far more effective a deterrent from laziness, in my opinion, than me moaning at the kids. I worry that the stress involved in trying to force students through exams, especially those for whom the subject hasn't clicked yet, is counter productive.

And yes, bonsoir, I agree re pictures, but that's not always possible with complicated or intangible concepts.

Zero - that doesn't quite match my exposure to 13+ scholarship papers - although admittedly DS is a year away from actually taking them so I have only seen the "common scholarship" papers so far. To me, they looked pretty much like O Level (so yes, probably beyond GCSE ) but the passages, apart from having lots of compound nouns, were not deliberately obscure.

6 months ago I was despairing of DS's French teaching. I am still not entirely happy, but they do seem to have upped their game and/or something has clicked with DS, as he has suddenly started to manage to put together sentences (written and orally) which, whilst not perfect, are comprehensible and make fairly correct use of tenses, etc. His vocabulary (and therefore comprehension) are still way off where I would like them to be, and he is definitely not at the point of reading novels in French (which yes, I did do at 16, as we had to read them in the summer before our first year of A level, so I would have been just 16) but then (a) he's only 12, and (b) I strolled through French O level without any noticeable amount of effort (much to my teacher's frustration) because I had been taught very well, by native speakers, at primary school, so I am not sure how accurate a view I have of how good "average" O level French really was...

Anyway, he refuses to be shipped off to live and go to school with his cousins in France so I just have to cross my fingers and hope that another 12 months will be enough to get him where he needs to be.