Standard of French

You can do classics with sanskrit at Oxford, ingrid. Just saying!

Ooh, I'll definitely look into that kalidasa thanks for the recommendation. He has been learning a bit about Swedish recently, and has expressed an interest in studying Classics at university, so if you come across a student of yours in a few years who dabbles in Sanskrit and Swedish, you will know MN is to blame .

"My DS's school taught English grammar through teaching Latin grammar. Once you've done it in one language it is much easier to apply to another."

This the "traditional" approach to teaching grammar in England. However, it doesn't encompass modern theories of grammar that are applied to European MFL.

I agree with Kalidasa although I think 10ish may still be young enough. languages as others have said are about fitting together permutations of patterns. There seems to be an emphasis on learning vocab and set phrases at primary age in French rather than the components of sentences and how to construct basic ones.
My DS's school taught English grammar through teaching Latin grammar. Once you've done it in one language it is much easier to apply to another.

Wow your DS is in a great position indrid. Buy him Teach Yourself Sanskrit for Christmas! Learning Sanskrit is the most astonishingly exciting thing if you are interested in comparative linguistics, and especially so if you have some Latin and Greek already.

kalidasa you make an interesting point I think.

For my DS languages are definitely his thing. He started Latin when he was 9 or 10, and had a great teacher who managed to make conjugations and declensions fun. I wouldn't say that DS loved learning all this stuff, but it certainly made it less boring.

He is about to take Latin, Greek, French and Russian for GCSE, and is genuinely interested in the differences in grammar and usage, sounds and pronunciation between these languages. He knows far, far more about the subject than I ever have.

In terms of learning, there are a lot more apps and software around now, which can make the learning a bit more enjoyable, although I appreciate the difficulties teachers have trying to motivate a class of uninterested teens.

French teachers who are proper French people educated in the French system undoubtedly make much better teachers of French grammar and spelling than anyone else. Of reading comprehension or writing I am far less sure!

I think part of the problem is not starting young enough. Primary-aged children who are well taught can genuinely enjoy a certain amount of "rote" learning - like times tables and so on - there's a particular kind of satisfaction to it. Whereas most teenagers/adolescents become naturally more interested in the reasons behind those patterns, asking why, interpreting etc - as they should at that age. The reasons why French or Latin conjugations or declensions are as they are (and why English mostly works differently) are truly fascinating and enormous fun to teach but you can't teach that sort of interesting stuff at all unless your students know the grammar (or at least grammar in some language) to start with.

I suspect that one of the reasons both my DC have had such rigorous teaching is that the teachers are all French!

Alyosha - it is total madness to "teach" French without making pupils memorise and practice conjugation. It is conceptually inconceivable for French people that anyone could "teach" French without formal explicit and repeated teaching of conjugation

Why aren't the conjugations explicitly taught though? It makes it so much easier! My own language teaching (in SHHS, a good girls' private school) was appalling. I came from a state school with no prior formal French education. My teacher simply assumed we would know the conjugations and taught out of the text book the entire time I was there. Eventually my parents realised I couldn't conjugate verbs and taught me themselves. I was amazed as I had no idea there was any rhyme or reason to why the verbs all changed or that you could even predict it all. It's not difficult to memorise the endings ffs! The language makes no sense at all unless you know the rules that underpin it, capricious though they may be.

Conjugation in French is not difficult - it is boring and repetitive.

The agreements of past participles are conceptually way harder to master.

I personally would ask when they intend to set!

So, then, what should I say at Y7 parents' evening next week about French? It is not set and - as Clary reports - you've got those chomping at the bit and those who struggle with the most basic of concepts.

Saying that, I was watching a programme yesterday on CBBC about two "bad" girls from a school in Essex sent to an Alaskan school for a sort of boot camp experience. These girls seemed unpromising students and had to do a Latin lesson. But they were conjugating a verb and looked as if they were enjoying the challenge. I can't help feeling that sometimes expectations are too low and, as someone said upthread, grammar isn't "fun".

Thread has moved on somewhat but just to respond -

I didn't post my entire yr 7 term 1 lesson plan but I promise you that I don't just teach them J'aime le foot. Yes, as fourcornered says, in the same series of lessons I teach them a dozen other sports and also how to say I don't like, I love, I deteste; I ask them the question (tu); in due course we talk about their brother or sister (il/elle) and so on.

Of course we don't just learn a load of phrases parrot fashion. If you could see me jump up and down with delight (sometimes literally) when a year 7 student manipulates the language and moves from je ne joue pas to Je ne fais pas you would see what I mean. but that's a high-achieving student and I also need to cater for students coming to me with a L3 in English.

A verb is a word that does an action, shows a state of being or helps another verb!! There you go Skylark, a definition of a verb from our US English grammar course.

Because a verb does not always involve action - I am (but I'm not doing anything). I can play tennis (can is a verb to but it is helping 'play', which is an action verb). Actually I can't play tennis but I wish I could!

"Ds was also put off by the numbers of pupils of French extraction taking A Level French."

DD was the only one in her A level class who didn't speak French more or less natively, as well as the only one who didn't spend every holiday there. She worked like stink and got a B - and has discovered a love for languages and is doing Russian for her "pick anything you like" module at uni. Thank goodness she didn't need the A/A* she was predicted for the French, because every single one from her school went to a child who was genuinely bilingual.

I would love to feel able to encourage DS, currently in year 11, to take an A level MFL. I really can't. Instead I'm sat here listening to him memorise chunks of text for his "oral exam" tomorrow. He's not learning French - he's doing the equivalent of a singer learning lyrics in a language they don't speak, because he gets more marks for memorised fancy constructions than for being able to hold a basic conversation (which he can do pretty darn well, actually). It makes me really cross. He used to love languages.

On another line entirely, someone said that people use primary school terms for grammar. If someone asked me what a verb was I'd probably say it was a doing word too, though I have A level French (oldstyle, with grammar) and O level Latin. I actually don't know how else you'd describe it

IMVHO Babar (the original ones by Jean de Brunhoff), Le Petit Nicolas, Astérix and Martine tell you most of what you need to know about French culture. Relationship to authority, innovation, institutions, bourgeois aspirations and base realities all covered .

News papers and Le Petit Nicolas are all you need to put French grammar in context for a very long time!

You sound like you are more of a visual learner, Tak. If you google learning styles quizzes, it might confirm it for you.

I think that part of the problem may be that different approaches suit different people.

Personally, I can't get my head round the spoken-no-grammar-no-written-language way of learning at all. I spent a lot of my time when I was studying Welsh through the intensive Wlpan course asking the teacher to write things down for me so I could remember them, things I hear and don't see just won't stick. But it's meant to be an amazingly successful course in general, and plenty of people swear by it.

(I also have absolutely no ear for music - I've wondered in the past if the two things are related.)

I suppose that studying the literature may not directly help you read or write modern French, but that isn't the point of putting it on a course.

Literature can help you access the people and their culture, but then so can film, music, food etc.

I guess A level cannot give over too much time to this ( and in the past perhaps too much was) but a little? To put all that grammar in context .

I have been reading this debate with interest. My own experience of O level French was that you could spend five years learning solid wodges of grammar and be able to pass an exam but no more. Not be able to hold a conversation, or ask for directions, not really be able to read anything. And no, we didn't learn the subjunctive - although I suspect that this was more to do with my school not getting through all the syllabus.

But then the pendulum swung too far the other way and grammar went completely out of fashion, resulting in young people babbling on in 'pidgin' French, so getting by, but being very limited.

Having learnt Spanish as an adult, classes now seem to have a good balance between the two, with the emphasis on reading, writing, speaking. (Although personally I would like to see more emphasis on listening and understanding.)

I can see the argument for ditching much of the literary content of A Level, even though it's something I personally like very much. Learning a MFL should equip you to read whatever you choose to/is useful and appropriate to your interests, but there's no real reason why it necessarily follows that you should demonstrate literary analysis skills. I am often impressed by the fluency that non-native speakers display in English, but I wouldn't expect for a moment that they should have to display an in-depth knowledge of the works of, say, George Orwell in order to be considered proficient in our language. It's a different matter if they just love his novels and want to read them.

On the other hand, it's possible to be too utilitarian about these things, and it seems a shame to completely junk all exposure to some fascinating figures of French literary culture.

Sartre and Camus featured heavily during my studies at university. They were of no use whatsoever. And these days I live in France and am so bilingual as to be rather a lot better at writing French than my (highly educated) DP...