Standard of French

I'm just trying to make it a bit interesting is all. And the idea is that it might be more fun if we learn to say "J'aime le foot, c'est fantastique. Je joue au foot le samedi" than if we sit there practising endlessly j'aime, tu aimes, il aime etc etc.

Sorry if I've got it right round my neck, but y'know, I teach 11yos (and 14yos as it goes) who can barely write their name in some cases, never mind tell me what an adjective is.

I don't personally think that the ability to conjugate verbs is as such going to help students a) pass their GCSE (helping them to do that is actually my job, ie the standard by which I am judged) or b) get by on holiday or when in a work situation and having to speak French to a French person. Of course we can't immerse students in French in 3 lessons a week - but we can encourage them to speak it and use it in those lessons, and conjugating verbs is not really going to inspire them. Or I haven't found that it does. Maybe I am doing it wrong (quite likely)

Thanks Sinclair btw

My guess is it was printed mid 60s and aimed at French 7-10year olds, garlic. A sort of French equivalent of Enid Blyton. Quite possibly it deliberately avoided use of the past historic.

Oh! Hadn't seen basildon's post. Great minds ...

OP Could you find someone to teach your DD a little Latin grammar? It would help enormously with her French - she'd never be satisfied with pre-digested phrases afterwards ...

I have taught MFL for over 20 years.
I teach a lot of grammar, but you have to couple it with interaction, otherwise it's just dry theory and kids get bored.
It's not straightforward though. You can't simply teach everyone a grammar-based course. It simply wouldn't work for a lot of children I teach.
You and your children may be able to cope with the past historic at the age of 12, but I teach children who can't even recognise 'I played football yesterday' as a sentence in the past tense. You have to provide a suitable curriculum for those children too.
We have limited lesson time for MFL, most English schools have not given it priority for a long time now. Compare with other countries, and they start earlier and have more lessons each week than we do.
If the attitude towards language learning was as positive amongst the general population as it is on here, we'd stand a much better chance, too.

Rafa, we were told the p. historic was becoming disused. I still see it in magazines & such, though, so perhaps it made a comeback.

I've always found the subjunctive hardest to teach English people, since ours is so atrophied. The concept's still here, but a lot of folks have great difficulty transferring it to a set of specified verb forms.

We definitely did past historic and subjunctive in Year 9/10 - the top set took French O-level in Year 10 and we all got As (selective girls' private school). What helped enormously with French grammar was compulsory Latin from Year 7.

The MFL lessons my children are being subjected to are such a colossal waste of everyone's time - the sole aim seems to be to get them through a (worthless) exam, but what is the point of getting an A or A* when they don't have the faintest grasp of how to hold even a rudimentary conversation??

Technically, I'm not totally sure Mystere a Menton and the like actually count as novels.

Presumably if they did use past historic we were only taught enough to be aware of it when translating rather than being taught much about it or to conjugate verbs in it. I really don't remember it and I do remember the other tenses.

Must admit I also found Le Grand M incomprehensible in any language. I remember dragging myself to a cinema on the other side of the city in the hope that the film would make things clearer. To this day I have not a clue ...

I dropped French for A Level because we couldn't do literature. I do think it's a pity.

But we did the subjunctive for GCSE, and (as thefirst says, we conjugated verbs and didn't confuse them with nouns). So perhaps it's all swings and roundabouts?

Great choice for an 18-year-old girl, busymummy :)

Just gone and checked it is Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan.

the dreaded Le Grand Meaulnes , iirc- God that was dull

Oh, BOF, thank you!! My schoolmates on FB were waxing lyrical about that pile of tosh a few weeks ago. I had to double-check we really had been at the same school!

I did O level French in 1979. The one book I can remember in 4th Year ( modern equivalent Y10) was called Chinois Blonde - excuse spelling etc !
Was a sort of detective / crime story.
Don't know if this was part of the syllabus or just something we did, reading this thread brought it back.
My DD is studying A level French and is reading a book with Tristresse in the title?

You couldn't read novels without the p. historic, surely? Maybe they just pick it up :) Think of the complexities in English mastered by a nine-year-old, for instance.

"Past historic is now taught at degree level!"

DD did past historic for A level (she took it last year), at about the same point in her school career that I did it in 1986 (i.e. early on in year 12). Similar for the subjunctive.

The difference, I suspect, is that I was at an open entry state sixth form and she was at an academically selective private school.

She did very little grammar at GCSE, still got an A*, and discovered when she started the A level course that she was rather behind her peers (she was in the bottom French set for GCSE, they'd all been in higher sets).

We did the subjunctive, not sure about past historic. We probably did given that we did read some books in year 11. I'm pretty sure that wasn't standard for 1998 though.

We definitely weren't allowed to use English during French lessons. We probably did during German ones though but I only did 2 years of German and the second of those was a complete waste of time and I didn't learn much.

Oh, I dunno, Mimsy. We had the option to take an extra language O-level in the lower sixth - I had a go at Spanish and Russian, but dropped out due to work commitments - and the expectation was you'd pass after one year. The classes were daily, and built on our pre-existing understanding of how languages work. Everyone who took the course passed with good grades. I'm still very good at learning languages now (and still hate those tables!)

Hula, was it Nos Amis and the endlessly irritating Catherine Lardan and her friends and family?

God, how things stick.

I went to an academically selective girls' school and did O level French in 1977. I was in the top set and I think we probably did more grammar than the other two sets. (We all did French O level.) We definitely did the past historic and the subjunctive. I didn't do A level so it had to be in what we'd now call years 9-11. (We'd started French from scratch in year 7.)

My son chose to do Italian from scratch in year 11. I was astounded to learn that this wasn't a taster course, the entire set was going to go from zero to GCSE standard in (effectively) nine months. I was even more astounded when the GCSE results came out and out of about 30 taking the GCSE one got an A and the others all got A. Now OK, these were very bright boys who had only been allowed to do this GCSE because they were (a) good linguists, (b) hard workers, (c) already up to a high standard in another Romance language (A in French or Spanish GCSE) and (d) also familiar to some extent with Latin. Italian GCSE in 9 months would be less of a stretch given all of that.

But I'm afraid my principal conclusion was that the academic standard required to get an A* in a MFL nowadays is nothing like as rigorous as it was to get an A grade O level in the 1970s.

I've skipped a lot of posts as I don't have children. I did want to say that, when I was at school in the Stone Age, we learned languages by using them - we read books, did 'conversation' and the school's policy was total immersion: we were not supposed to speak or hear any English in class. We did learn Latin as well, though, so the grammar in 'romance' languages was done more or less as an aside: do you see how this is an irregular verb? Notice how she uses the past historic to distance the events (cue 5 minutes on the past historic) and so on.

German had to involve a degree of rote-learning, sadly, and we read Goethe in bastard Hochdeutsch. Although I was fluent, I sat my German exams with various tables written on slips of paper up my sleeve

Anyway - I'm a committed fan of learning language by using it. Copying chunks of text, not so much.

I wonder if there's a record of the syllabus (I think our exam board was AQA) online anywhere? I'd love to know if I'm misremembering things- maybe I am, and getting mixed up with the A Level course? I don't think so though.

I did some tenses and some irregular verbs - but nothing more than what 12y DD is doing now in her Key Stage 3 French. But definitely no reading of French books.

I remember pretty much every lesson involved a French textbook involving a family from somewhere in France - Dieppe maybe??

Hulababy, I did the same year as you, and we definitely did tenses and learned irregular verbs etc, and did some reading of French books (the dreaded Le Grand Meaulnes , iirc- God that was dull ). We really did have brilliant teachers- I'm pretty sure they dragged an A or B out of 28 of us from a class of 32.

I'm in Germany, with two sickeningly bilingual kids (sickening because they are natives speakers in German to a degree I'll never be, but actually I'm quite proud of them) who go to school in a two-language school using immersion. Immersion works perfectly as long as it's introduced early enough - ideally at the start of primary school - and makes up at least a quarter of the school curriculum. But it still needs to be backed up with grammar lessons in both languages.

Grammar teaching and conversation practice are both useless without the other. If you teach phrases without grammar, there is no underlying structure which would enable people to form their own sentences and adapt language chunks. If you teach grammar without activating the language through conversation, it's nothing more than a particularly boring mathematical exercise with zero function apart form passing exams.

From what I can tell, language lessons in Germany have changed considerably over the last 20 years, but they're still not conversational enough, IMO. There's very little emphasis on spoken English. This may be because many many German teenagers go to the States or Canada (or the UK or any other English-speaking country) for six months to a year and learn the language fluently at 16. So they've already had the grammar in school, and then living with a host family in the country 'activates' that fluency. Compare that to the typical 'language exchange' in the UK, when kids go to the partner country for a week or two. In that time you can achieve very little apart from establishing that people do indeed speak this language in reality.

DD1 went to France for three months last year when she was 15. We arranged it individually, but it was a part of a programme supported by the school. She spent the whole of the first month in shock, failing to understand most things and finding it all a bit freaky away from us, then she turned the corner and came back absolutely fluent in colloquial and formal French. She's now doing the equivalent of French A-Level (and reading L'étranger , no getting away from that).

The two major problems with this kind of exchange in the UK are A. people are ridiculously overprotective with teenagers and unwilling to let them go abroad for longer than a week or so B. foreign languages are regarded as so unimportant that people can't think of any reason to learn them apart from being able to order food in a restaurant, and why would you go to school abroad to just learn that?