I'm experimenting in teaching French to DD

The sort of training necessary for effective MFL teaching to primary aged DC is also incredibly hard to access. Most decent teachers work from a position of personal experience.

Again, sendsummer, it is unfair to blame teachers for failing to impart proper teaching of French grammar in primary schools. There are very few quality materials available for teaching MFL to English primary aged DC and so teachers have to improvise.

If the money could be made available there should be more specialist language teachers shared between primary schools teaching MFLs with the same approach to grammar as in French schools. Unfortunately not all MFL teachers seem to be good at this since IME pupils from many private junior schools taught French or whatever from a young age still seem pretty rubbish at it in secondary and beyond

It's an interesting thread. I don't think I've learned anything new but it's comforting to know that other parents, as well as MFL teachers, are frustrated by state-led prevention of proper access to MFL teaching in schools. A scandal.

I once contacted the head of MFL to ask why my Y7 DC had come home with page after page in exercise book showing French verbs incorrectly conjugated, je chante, tu chante, il chante, nous chante, vous chante, ils chante etc. I was told that not conjugating at the beginning "made it easier to learn". Same school gave lengthy lists of nouns to learn with no articles to show masc/fem. Zut alors!

Really interesting thread. My DCs are only yr5 and yr3 so not experienced this with them yet but I do remember being horrified at how little my DSCs were learning when they were at secondary.

My two are home educated now and we are doing Spanish and (due to being anime fans) Japanese. Setting up monthly tuition sessions in both to keep us going but will mostly be self studying.

Your experience with your DC seems to make sense. I passed GCSE French in 1990 and it was all topic based, memorising phrases. When I arrived in France a few years later to live for 6 months I realised I couldn't formulate a sentence. It was frustrating. I needed the building blocks of grammar. I learnt to communicate in the end and have good pronunciation but still make heaps of grammar mistakes with conjugation- I think I'll try teaching my DD one to one as you have.

I took French at A level in 1970. We were extremely well taught. Not having spoken the language for 20 years we stayed in Province and it all came back to me. and I was neither the sharpest knife in the box nor was I a good student

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

Working bloody hard to teach mfl! But when there is not enough lesson time, when you have to teach to the exam (which encourages learning set pieces off by heart), when many pupils see mfl as a difficult and unimportant subject and when pupils are so ignorant of how their own language works that it makes it much harder to learn a new one, we are pretty pushed tbh.

Mfl really is a school subject which is different from the others. If we as a nation want to actually get good at it and teach it well to our children, we need to prioritise it and make proper and suitable space for it in the curriculum (and teach our kids English grammar sensibly from early primary age). I don't think that as a nation we actually are sufficiently interested in doing so though.

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

Fighting against a tide of

• but everyone speaks English, Miss

sendsummer - people may well travel or than they did but that really isn't (tragically) any guarantee of cultural understanding. Other EU countries are explicit about the fact that two or mor MFL must be taught to all pupils in order to foster European feeling. Not so in the UK.

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

I really resent being somehow to blame for the fact that our government does not prioritise the learning of languages.
I do my best with classes of 35 once a week. I'm not sure I can change the world with the little time I have!

i missed the first two years of French due to being in a different schooling system. My dad bought me loads of children's books and tapes in French and it was amazing how quickly I over took my classmates.
It also gave me a real love of the language and a confidence that comes from learning it organically.

Some grammar is natural, particularly in children . I read quite a lot about it for my dissertation.

MrsBernardBlack that is always the dilemma is n't it, depth in one subject or breadth.

BoboChic you may have a point but to balance the dumbing down far more students have had at least a superficial contact in at least French and loads more have had the opportunity to travel to Europe. Only a relatively small proportion of pupils thirty to fourth years ago took O'levels in a MFL and I suspect that the demographics of those (who were a relative academic elite) would be the same as those who would have mainly voted 'remain'.

didgeridooda I think that speaking does develop grammatical inaccuracies when expressing more complex phrases without an increasing knowledge of grammar but obviously quite a lot may be camouflaged by for example similar sounding. However lack of grammar certainly creates a barrier for reading and writing and IMO
for simplifying the learning of MFLs.

The dumbing down of MFL syllabi in the U.K. in the past 40 years contributed significantly to the very poor understanding of much of the electorate of the other Member States of the EU and eroded feelings of solidarity with and loyalty to them.

sendsummer

He did think about it at first, yes, but eventually decided that the language would just be an extra distraction.

Languages are compulsory in primary but provision is patchy and piecemeal.
There's a growing number of specialist MFL teachers working in primaries now though, and even teaching grammar alongside the more traditional vocab.

Our brains are design to grasp language before the age of 6. Trying to learn a language in two hours a week as a teenager is much more difficult. Learning 1:1 oppose to 30:1 will also have a huge impact.

MrsBernardBlack did he not consider doing Classics and a MFL or oriental studies?

English as a native language is not a language that lends itself to teach a proper grammatical approach from a young age due to its irregularity. That is one advantage that native French or German speakers have, lessons in their own language go hand in hand with learning increasing complex grammatical structures which can then be applied to foreign languages.
One of my DCs' schools taught Latin from an early age using it to also teach parallel basic grammar structures in English. That school also taught a lot of grammar for MFLs. IMO the advantage of starting young is that there is no syllabus to comply with and the grammar rules with continuous practice became second nature. Unfortunately state primary schools don't have access to language teachers so if they do learn French or another MFL at that stage it is usually just phrases or words that are quickly forgotten.

I do agree with the problems of teaching languages in schools in Britain, however I still believe it is worth trying to improve and encourage it. I don't really think it matters that students won't be fluent at the end of a GCSE course, but it will catch the imagination of some children who have a flair for learning them, and who will want to take it further,

My DS has always loved learning new languages, and is now studying Greek, Latin and Portuguese at A level. He was also studying Russian, but dropped it in the summer. He is lucky to go to a school where language teaching is superb, and where native speaking teaching assistants run extra, compulsory, conversation sessions for every language taught. He has also dabbled in teaching himself some Swedish and Hindi in his own time. His knowledge and understanding of grammar impresses me enormously.

However, his interest is very much in the comparative grammar, philological and linguistic aspects of language. He has found the A level curriculum incredibly boring, as he is having to learn specific vocabulary so he can write essays on various topics that he has no interest in. One was on prisons and another on alternative energy. I believe that this is the main reason that he has opted to apply for Classics and university and not modern languages, which made me sad.

AndNone it definitely is worth using Duolingo to learn a new language. I started Italian from scratch a couple of weeks ago and have picked up the (very) basics already. If you enjoy languages it's fun to do.

Yes, it starts off at a very basic level.