Standard of French

chemenger What does your DD say when you tell her she knows next to nothing?

They both also study literature too!

But four I have two children who are currently learning MFL in a more traditional way for want of a better term and they are both enjoying their languages and highly skilled in them.

Both will take at least one further to A level.

Some schools are teaching this way with excellent results.

I accept of course that your own hands may well be tied in this matter. The school will have policies on far off piste you are encouraged to go.

I am comparing like with like, both dd and I got A's at the same stage in French, she knows next to nothing. Something is broken in MFL teaching and assessment if her ability is now considered excellent.

A few have said that it was how they learnt and it worked for them. What a lot of people remember and what they say they still remember are literature components - which won't help the average student either. None of the previous posters have said 'I got a C/D at O-level' - I think that many of the pervious posters were academic students and their experience isn't that of the 'average'.

forcing the E/D/C grade students to learn nothing but grammar

Has anyone on this thread really suggested that?

Except you have misquoted (and misunderstood)... a) pass their GCSE (helping them to do that is actually my job, ie the standard by which I am judged) she's quite right, they don't need to be able to conjugate millions of verbs in all persons to gain a grade C (a pass) This is the result of the syllabus and how they are tested. Students that achieve As and A* do more. They are all taught the same syllabus but while the C grades are still getting to grips with I and we forms in each tense the stronger students are pulling ahead - forcing the E/D/C grade students to learn nothing but grammar limits them because they don't have the nouns to go with them and they don't have the dictionary skills to do it themselves. That's not because teachers in MFL (or indeed, English) don't teach them these things but we are judged on a strict set of criteria and there simply isn't time to be all things to all people.

Many classes at GCSE level are mixed ability - the most common grade in MFL is a C - both target and achievement. As long as the vast majority of students get their target grades (or better) we are doing everything that the system expects us to do. It doesn't mean we agree with all of it but we can't just change it, that's what the students, and we, are judged by.

The Grand Moan. Awful.

My private school had three sets. Unusually the bottom set took CSE. (Almost all other subjects were O level.) I used to envy them their more practical 'holiday' syllabus, but welcome the added understanding of grammar. Top set took the O level early giving more time for A level.

Languages for my dyslexic daughter were a real trial. I ended up searching out the side bars in her French text book to teach her the grammar to allow her to decode the phrases she had to learn. There was no grammar at all in her German text book and by the end of her first year she did not know the present tense of the verb to be. Her brother had much more formal teaching with tough weekly tests of grammar, vocabulary and phrases, so we used his text book. Dd then spent much of the summer before GCSEs learning a set number of words each day, along with the grammar. Even then the learning of set passages for the oral was tough and took up a disproportionate proportion of her GCSE revision time. That is despite her having a genuinely good ear for language.

The reward is that she is reasonably confident speaking basic French and German. Indeed recently was able to help some lost French tourists. (They gave her 20 Euros as they were so relived when she got them to the Gatwick Express in time for their flight!) She also got A*s which she may need when applying for a competitive sciency course.

But it was essentially home ed. The current approach seems to give real advantage to kids whose parents who speak languages themselves and who want the same for their children, and those who have the resources to organise plenty of exposure.

fourcornered I was responding to this:

I don't personally think that the ability to conjugate verbs is as such going to help students a) pass their GCSE

In clary's second post. I'd find it hard to interpret that as a reference to the starting point.

I did 9 years of French at school. I struggled so much with A level that my D grade was an achievement. I thought I was just crap at French and my A level teacher agreed and made sure I, and the rest of the class, knew it.

A few years ago I had a year in Paris as an au pair for a bilingual family who wanted me to speak only in English with the children. I worked on average 50-hour weeks so didn't have as much opportunity to speak French as I had anticipated.

But I did attend French classes for 5 hours a week for 9 months. I am still by no means fluent but my French is good now. The lessons were conducted completely in French by French people. I suddenly found that learning French was within my capabilities and that a lot of what my bullying A level teacher had taught us was wrong, both in turn of phrase and pronunciation.

I now enjoy reading French novels and can have a conversation if others speak clearly and feel that if British kids had the excellent teachers I had in Paris they could get from nought to better than A level standard in two years.

As for my A level teacher, I fantasise about bumping into her and telling her in perfect French what I think of her ridiculing me in front of the class so much that I just stopped going to her lessons because I was petrified!

My spoken story was about a woman falling down stairs, breaking her leg, going to hospital in an ambulance and ending up in a hospital bed with a nurse giving her a cup of tea, not knowing the French for broken leg, ambulance and hospital was a slight handicap, luckily the last two are easily guessed. The written essay, a page of continuous prose, was, thankfully "My trip to Paris" which I had more vocabulary for, I still recall the trauma of finding the lift at the Eiffel Tower broken! Quel dommage! Nowadays they are allowed dictionaries all the time so unseen translation loses its sting! Too much to ask to learn page after page of vocab.

"look, if you just know how to conjugate an er verb you can also write tu aimes le foot and il aime le foot and nous aimons le foot, and if you understand how negatives work you can also write je n'aime pas le foot, and if you learn a few extra verbs you can also write j'adore le foot or je deteste le foot, and if you learn a few extra nouns you can also write j'aime la natation or j'aime l'equitation..."

Of course we say exactly this to them! clary too! It's how the progress. Clary was just giving an example of the starting point. What has been written above is EXACTLY what we do next! In fact, what you have written are exactly what my Y8 class have been writing/saying in the topic of free time and leisure....

Ah, the days of the unseen translation. One key word you didn't know and you were f**d.

And we had to write a short story on a given subject. I still remember mine was "A tiger has escaped from the zoo..." I remember that my essay consisted of many "Au secours!" to fill up the space!

Again and again you hear teachers saying they can't teach this or that because it's hard or that it's not accessible to all pupils, or even [scream!] that it's not fun. Meanwhile, those who can, or even those who profess to not be able but could if pushed, miss out.

Modern language teaching also encourages the narcissist! It's all "I". As in, "J'aime les glaces," or "Je n'aime pas le sport," etc etc. No one else exists!

As to the ability of our European friends, well, they have a head start. I'm sure if many of our tv programmes and nearly all of our popular music was in, say, Dutch then we'd be fairly familiar with that language. As it is, most people never come across any French at all in their day-to-day lives.

I find it mind blowing that my French, which I stopped learning in 1978 at O grade (like GCSE) was better than dd's when she got an A in Int 2 (same level) two years ago. Better as in a wider vocabulary, more fluent speaking and better understanding of grammar, and I have used it only very occassionally since school, I have not practised it. As far as I can see language learning now consists of learning set phrases and matching them to set questions and looking words up in dictionaries. When I did O grade we had to look at a series of pictures, make up a story and tell that story orally for five minutes - talking continuously about an unseen situation, for 5 minutes. Dd has more chance of achieving unpowered flight for five minutes. Every European student I see speaks adequate to excellent English - why can't we teach our children anything of foreign languages? I'm sure there were plenty of pupils who did less well in French at my school but the teachers did not use the excuse that "not everyone could do it" to avoid teaching anyone anything.

I'm so damn slow ... Now I feel like part of a gang dragging clary round the back of the bike sheds.

It's not your fault clary - but what is the point of a French language exam that can be passed without a solid understanding of how to use verbs. And you do make the ability to conjugate verbs sound like some discrete and unnecessarily elite? distancing? show offy? old fashioned accomplishment. It's as if you're saying I don't personally think the ability to waltz as such is going to help them pass ... But it's not separate, it's intrinsic to any ability to manipulate the language. You learn six regular verbs; you have access to a million others. And you learn, if you haven't already, that you've been using diverse and complicated verbs throughout your young life anyway.

And why wouldn't knowing that be fun?

And who the hell said that learning is all about fun anyway?

Whilst I understand that teachers have to gear lessons to all abilities, this is what rigorous setting and foundation/higher papers at GCSE should achieve.

We can't hold back our potentially able linguists so as to engage pupils with no aptitude or enthusiasm for the task at hand.

As for making it fun- well the reality is that becoming proficient at something usually involves a bit of labour. Take our that labour and you lose the proficiency.

And do you even engage the majority with the 'fun' approach anyway? MFL have never had such low take up rates at A level and degree level in state schools!

Compare that to schools which take a more traditional approach to languages ( both modern and ancient) and you will find not only better grades at GCSE but a higher take up rate going forward. Clearly, grammar is not putting off the punters.

Ten years or so ago, a friend of mine told me that her daughter had chosen her GCSE options. She was in year 9. She'd been studying one language since year 7 (comprehensive school in leafy suburb) and had decided not to take it in years 10 and 11. Hardly any pupils at this school took an MFL beyond year 9, presumably because it was seen as hard and boring. It didn't sound as if the school was encouraging them much, presumably with an eye on the league tables.

Anyway, because of this lamentable state of affairs, the school's policy was that the whole of year 9 would take GCSE in the MFL they were studying. They knew from the outset that most of them would struggle to get a G after three years of study, but they thought it would be good to have an extra GCSE on the record. Really?

(This isn't an anti-comp diatribe. My daughter's school was a comp and almost all the girls took both French and Spanish in KS3 and could take Latin from year 9 if they wanted. Good take-up of all three to GCSE, good numbers taking A level and a handful proceeding to do MFL and occasionally Classics at university.)

GCSE MFL syllabi and examinations are a scandal.

While I was giving my hobby horse a good long run, I see skylark has made my point much more clearly and succinctly!

I'm not a teacher and I only have French and German to O level. I haven't travelled abroad much so haven't had much occasion to speak either language, and would struggle to do it now.

Having said all that, the languages I did study to degree level were Latin and Classical Greek. There was (obviously) no emphasis on learning to speak these languages, it was all about reading (and to a lesser extent, writing) them. To do this it is absolutely essential to have a good grounding in the grammar. Knowing vocabulary is just not enough. You have to understand why the phrases that crop up again and again mean what they mean. Surely it's the same, and even more important, if you want to learn to speak and write another language?

Say your teacher gets you to learn off by heart a string of words which you are told means 'I have a sister who lives in London.' If you understand the meaning of each word in the sentence and also how the words relate to each other grammatically you can work out from that model how to put together another sentence which means 'I have a brother who works in Cambridge'. If on the other hand your understanding of the language you are supposedly learning is limited to just knowing that phrase parrot fashion with no grasp of why it means what you're told it means, that's all you know - just that one phrase.

It must be very difficult teaching an MFL to young people who are barely literate in English, and personally I can't see the point. However, the reason we study languages is not just so we can pass a GCSE with a C grade, tick that box and move on. The attitude to language learning in this country is abysmal. We should start earlier and give it more time and far more status. Controversially, I was delighted that Gove put a language pass into the English Bacc. Long overdue.

I agre with BOFster - I think it's really sad that kids are taught "j'aime le foot" and nobody says to them, "look, if you just know how to conjugate an er verb you can also write tu aimes le foot and il aime le foot and nous aimons le foot, and if you understand how negatives work you can also write je n'aime pas le foot, and if you learn a few extra verbs you can also write j'adore le foot or je deteste le foot, and if you learn a few extra nouns you can also write j'aime la natation or j'aime l'equitation..."

All those extra sentences for free when you only learned one.

You can do both though, I think: "Tu aimes le football aussi?" and a run-through of the different forms of the verb.

I do appreciate that teachers are very pushed for time and under pressure to teach to the exam, though.

I suppose what we are reflecting on in this thread is whether the exams and syllabus at the moment really represent the best way to educate kids in another language. I wouldn't want to go back to the very dry and formal methods of chanting verb tables (my impression of the old O Level), but if it is all just context-based chat, I can't see that it equips students to understand anything about language structure. I'm not a teacher or an expert, but I really don't think that what my dd1 learned during her GCSE course got her to a reasonable standard of useable French, despite her A*, and it did seem better to me when I was at school in the late 80s.

I'm aware I sound like a fusty old bore, but that's my impression.