Standard of French

That's fair enough, I chose my own degree many years ago on the basis of its strong language component and Y2 DEUG study in a French university for my year abroad.
I still think that some level of interaction with literary French should exist in the A level syllabus, even if as a translation exercise.
I can't pretend I enjoyed reading Le Notaire du Havre or Le Noeud de Viperes

In t'olden days I can't say my A Level literature was up to much. We had to do three German novels, but answer the questions in English. In lessons you spent hours painstakingly writing out the English above the German (dictated by the teacher) and that was that. A glimpse at a German newspaper or magazine might have been a worthwhile addition to the course...

Literature is somewhat falling out of favour in MFL teaching. The CEFR puts much more emphasis on modern usage in current RL situations than on literary analysis.

I am so getting ds and dd a Nouveau Bescherelle and a Bon Usage when I am next in France.
Luckily dd is being taught French five lessons a week immersion-style and she has improved MASSIVELY in half a term. Ds is on course for a good iGCSE grade and taking the subject at Higher IB level next year, also thanks to a French native speaker.
My children are fortunate in that they are both at academically selective state schools with language specialisms. Even so, provision has wobbled a little in ds' case.

No Leeds2, they don't
Not according to the AQA board.

HTF are they going to manage when they start their degree?

I wonder how many British 18 year olds could cope (ie get a useful grade such as 7.0) with the foreign-language equivalent of IELTS? We can set a gold standard for other people's mastery of our language - why does that not translate into our own standards of MFL?

Do A Level MFL students still do literature as part of their course?

When lecturers at the best universities, such as Kalidasa on this thread, say they have to assume a starting point of 'zero grammar knowledge' for some languages taken up at degree level I think this shows that we've lost our way? Surely that's just absurd?

To my mind it points to a ridiculous dumbing down but perhaps it is just a change of style? We could all cope with simple novels in French at A'level in the 80s but that style of teaching has fallen out of fashion. It's ok to now guess at the grammar as we have the internet for that sort of knowledge etc. Instruction in the old fashioned formal sense is out of fashion and the child led/pick it all up by osmosis method has been in vogue for the last couple of decades. I think there are signs that the pendulum is swinging back now. Surely if you have the grammar/structure down pat first the rest comes much more easily?

That makes sense.

I think the numbers studying has more to do with what schools offer as alternatives now than anything else. Firstly it was made optional in most schools and then the schools offered other 'more interesting' choices. Kids like the idea of media studies (because they wrongly things it's all about watching films), anything ending in 'ology' (because they think it sounds grown up) and child care (because they think it's all sand pits and play dough). In schools that stuck to the traditional 'academic' choices there has been little change in the numbers from when MFL became optional to now. Certainly in my current and previous schools teachers say the class sizes show little difference from 2006. Where it differs is that my previous school had approx 15% of a cohort in MFL (because of the range if options) whereas my current school has about 40% (because if the comparatively low number of choices). Academically the schools are close - they just play the numbers game differently.

The thing is the emphasis on A Level grades has made many pupils, and I would include ds among those, shy away from MFL for fear of not getting a top grade. I think this is driving huge numbers of kids towards Biology etc which have a much higher hit rate of A*s/As.

Ds was also put off by the numbers of pupils of French extraction taking A Level French. He felt he was on a hiding to nothing. I'm sure it's not the case everywhere but there seem to be an awful lot of kids locally with a French mother - much entente cordiale 17 or so years ago!

four how can you say interest in MFL hasn't changed when numbers studying at UG level were at the lowest point in a decade in 2013/14?

And of those who did take it further, the numbers that were educated in the state sector fell even further?

Rafals - MFL teachers DO teach grammar, and much of the markscheme when marking the written element of the GCSE is based on grammar - they have to be able to use the tenses at the very least to convey their meaning. However, the way the 'exams' work allows them to learn chunks of a pre-planned essay off by heart to regurgitate in controlled conditions, with the use of a dictionary! Plus, the writing is only one part - once you mix that in with the listening, reading and speaking exams, it's quite possible to get a C without a good grasp of the grammar.

We do teach grammar, I promise! But there is not the time to give the necessary grounding (in English to start with! ).

Teaching grammar is my forte. I love doing it, and have had many pupils over the years thank me when they've had those 'lightbulb moments! . But in the vast majority of schools, with the majority of classes we are fighting a losing battle.

Thanks Bof and chemenger. I think it's sometimes hard not to take things personally - stupid over an impersonal forum really. Perhaps it's because I bite my youngest too much when 'real life' people put their oar in... But there's another thread.

"TheWordFactory" yes.... But I am actually qualified to pontificate on this point surely... Much as you might be able to pontificate on say.... Immunology?! No idea, but it comes with a reasonable wage so feel free to run with it :)

The standards/interest in MFL has altered little, unarguable. Same of most other subjects though... Overall population academic aptitude has not changed either though. Also, according to what 'they' (ofsted/the government/mother of the bogeyman) are looking for actually most students have got proper access to MFL which brings me back to my previous comment about his being the way we teach, which I'm not saying is not limited and I'm not saying is the only way. What they don't have is what some posters remember through rose tinted hindsight vision...

To be honest, the same seems to apply to written English as well ("language EVOLVES don't you know!") in the age of the internet and more and more informal communication seeping into contexts where it shouldn't oughta be. But that's a whole different thread.

It's possible the two are related though.

four lets not play the 'who is most qualified' game. Plenty of us here are very well qualified.

The reality is that the current method of teaching MFL has not resulted in increased standards or interest in MFL.

That much is unarguable surely?

We are currently in a situation where a very small number of pupils in the UK have access to proper MFL provision. Most teachers and university lecturers are up in arms about this and are certainly not defending the status quo.

Nobody is bashing teachers, four! They do a fantastic and challenging job, and I'd double their wages tomorrow if I were in charge.

The thrust of this thread seems to me to be comparing the differing approaches (largely dictated from on high) of today and a generation ago.

A lot of that seems to be connected to the changes to GSCEs and apparent grade inflation.

The issue goes further than just how teachers are forced to teach, too. There seems to have been a wider societal shift to undermine the perceived necessity in the first place for learning a MFL.

I really don't want to put the blame on teachers here, I understand that they need to teach what and how they are told to teach (which, coming from a time when teachers seemed to have much more freedom to be different if not down right eccentric, I think is sad). However the way that things are required to be taught is not, apparently, giving a useful outcome. If a "good" school qualification in French does not allow you to communicate in French with some ease, when it used to do that, then there is surely something wrong, not with the teachers but with the system.

I learnt this way and got GCSE A*, A at A level and a 2:1 at a good university through the current system (I'm 29). I have a masters in linguistics and professional qualifications including a PGCE. I'm also leading a successful department in an average comprehensive in an average town in Northern England with an above national average GCSE pass rate and an above national average take up at post 16 for MFL but clearly you all know better than me about how languages should be taught. This is the way we teach, I'm not saying it isn't limited and I'm not saying it is the only way. I'm just trying to say that it works for what we have to achieve for them according to what those above us want them tested on. The syllabus is about to change dramatically with a return to some if the methods/tests used previously, I'll probably be having this conversation again in a few years time when people are saying 'but X worked fine for me, why did they change it". At which point Universities will say "but we've changed our courses to reflect what students didn't know before, why did you change it. We have to change again now,". And thus will continue this circle. I'm going to go and have a coffee, eat a biscuit and breathe.

My DD is in CM2 (Year 6) at a French-English bilingual school in Paris. She has done conjugation in French since CE1 (Year 3) and will continue to do so into secondary. She does plenty of grammar and is regularly tested on parts of speech and sentence construction. She also learns Spanish and has started conjugation in a big way. It's impossible to learn MFL without a good grounding in grammar.

kalidasa. I think you're right. My DD was the only one in her A level German class. There were two classes of Spanish students.

I am a lecturer in classics at a very good UK university. We do quite a lot of beginners' teaching for students who didn't have the opportunity to do Latin or Greek at school. Our students all have at least AAB at A level and excellent GCSEs (almost always including at least one MFL) but we have to assume a starting point of zero grammar knowledge - we can't even assume that they will know the difference between a noun and a verb, an adjective and an adverb, so we have to teach these concepts in English in the first few days. The ones that do have some knowledge of these concepts often come out with phrases that suggest that what they learnt dates back to effective primary school teaching - e.g. a verb is a 'doing word'. This suggests that for most of our students who did not have the chance to learn Latin at school - that is, in practice, mostly state school-educated students - there was no formal grammar content in GCSE MFL teaching.

It is part of my job to assess the likely language aptitude of incoming students who have never tried to learn an ancient language: after a few years of data gathering our guidelines now state that an A or above in a GCSE MFL has no particular predictive power (!), although a B or below tends to predict outright failure in our beginner language modules. An A in a MFL A level is an advantage (as you'd hope it would be!), especially in e.g. German (probably because German word order is less like English and more like a classical language). But the numbers doing German have fallen off a cliff in the last few years - I think I am right that fewer students do A level German than Latin now. Certainly A level German has become, like classical languages, almost completely confined to private and grammar schools.

How the fuck does someone still getting to grips with the I and we forms in each tense, presumably after 2-3 years at KS3 manage to get a C? Have we really devalued the GCSE that much?

No one is saying you should only teach grammar. Just that is isn't being taught well at the moment. Students aren't going to fail their GCSE because you've taught them grammar. On the contrary I'm willing to bet you might get better results if you stop only teaching children to pass the GCSE, because they will actually be able to speak reasonable French.

DD agrees about her ability, we laugh about it! She was shocked when she got an A. She's very good at other things, and probably would have been good at French if it had been taught more systematically. She was much better at Latin, which was taught very traditionally.