Blimey : MFL A levels have changed

Piggy

I’m the same. I love learning and can’t understand why the dcs aren’t as geeky as me..

The thing I remember most about Brecht is his invention of Verfremdungseffekt which means 'you're watching a play, remember, don't get drawn in, you're supposed to be thinking about it'.

I took French A level circa 1991 and the lit texts were Les Quatre Cents Coups, Zazie dans le Metro, Silence de la Mer and Boule de Suif.

Lit essays were written in English but our teachers also made us write about lit in French too, for extra language practice. My whole class got As, but it was my hardest A level.

Ah Piggy we did Katharina Blum too, that was the one we read in English! So so hard!! Also Besuch der alten Dame (love) Gute Mensch von Sezuan and Romeo and Julia Auf dem Dorfe; French was Tartuffe (aaargh), Candide ( aaaarrrgh), La Porte Etroite and Ka Guerre de Troie n'aua pas lieu. Quite a mix! Besuch the best by far.

Loving everyone's memories :) I did a level in 1982 too! I love Le Grand Meaulnes, it's like the great Gatsby? Really want to read some of these now!

I did A-level Latin too, in the 80s, Lancelottie. Politics and religion galore. I needed weekly booster sessions in the first year to get my grammar up to speed as the School Classics Project O-level had almost no formal grammar in it at all.

I am hearing impaired, and MFL speaking and listening was always a challenge for me, so despite getting an A in an old-style O-level French, I don't think I could have coped with A-level. I knew how I struggled to find the vocabulary to put captions to pictures; whole essays would have sent me over the edge.

@Piggywaspushed I believe we may be of a similar vintage; I too possess CSYS German and French and recognise some of the texts you mention. However - we definitely wrote essays about the texts in the foreign language... I found mine when cleaning out some stuff recently so I'm pretty confident about that!

A bit off topic but dd has started state secondary and was looking forward to learning French. They have two native French speakers in her class and she says the teacher spends the entire lesson talking to them

Yes but they probably don't read Dickens at Abitur

my english abitur exam 6 hour long. main part was writing an essay on the great gatsby...
in addition we were given some short texts to analyse and compare tge use of adverbs.

dickens would have been easier

Took A level French in the 60s. Everything written in French. Also much conversation as well as grammar. I was not a good pupil but, all these years later I still speak French quite well. Just back from holiday there - spoke hardly any English at all.

I did Latin at A-level. Quite a bit of agriculture in that but possibly less recycling and drug taking (though you have to wonder about parts of Ovid's Metamorphoses).

Basically, only bother doing MFL if already fluent?

Oh.

DD (yr 11) was pondering doing French A-level. None of the rest of us are capable of more than ordering a coffee. Apart from DuoLingo, is there anything she could do to bridge the gap and make it a more realistic prospect? She is currently ploughing through Harry Potter in French by way of bedtime reading, but although her owl-wand-and-cloak vocabulary is improving, her political and drug-taking one is probably a long way behind.

Yes indeed. I could probably have a half decent conversation with a French person about drugs, AIDS (it was the 90s when I did my A levels ) and airline terrorism. But when I went there on holidays I struggled horribly with things like trying to buy paracetamol when I fell ill, and deciphering the local taxes on holiday accommodation.

Therese Desqueroux is free on kindle in French, if anyone’s interested

Like the OP, I also did French CSYS in Scotland in the Middle Ages.

It was a bit of a farce as the teacher was not a strong French speaker (extremely dodgy accent) and very unenthusiastic (with hindsight, probably depressed).

Luckily I spent a lot of time in France (mainly looking after small children) and taught myself a lot by reading Marie Claire, reading modern French novels, watching films and tuning into a very crackly France Inter. We wrote our Lit papers in English, we did La Guerre de Troyes...and maybe some Maupassant. I can’t remember. I had to study a region of France and ended up writing and essay on food and drink in Alsace in English complete with made up references to nonexistent books I hadn’t read..’Alsace my Way’

Anyway I got away with it and got an A. I’m sure I couldn’t get an A now at A level (even though my French is better) as sounds much more rigorous.

Certainly looking at my dcs the A level students work way harder than CSYS students in the 80s.

None of my dcs so far seem interested in MFL, they are put off by the rote learning of GCSE. They can see that it doesn’t really help them to communicate properly in a real situation. Duolingo is more practical, it even has ‘bots’ to talk to now.

This thread is a good insight into what’s required for A level though.

I did A level French in the mid-90s (should have done German as I was better at it!).

I definitely remember having to write essays in French and we did Bonjour Tristesse and Therese Desqueroux. The latter enriched my vocabulary and there are so many French words I remember solely due to that book!

It was a massive jump from GCSE - I'm a natural introvert and found the requirement to discuss, with near fluency, complex social issues, paralysing.

I can't cope with the emphasis on bloody ishoos these days. I recently did a GCSE in (yet another) language and I had to learn reams of vocab on drug use and recycling. And the listening is always something like, "Four young people are discussing how they recycle..." As if!! Dd is currently learning masses of phrases about climate change. What happened to "Can you direct me to the town hall?" !

I did A Level German - with no teacher. Well, the teacher went on long-term sick leave and we had to struggle through on our own, including trying to read the set texts. I can't imagine this happening today, or if it did parents would storm the school. I don't think my parents even knew.

Anyway, engraved on my heart is trying to read Der Verlorene Ehre der Katharine Blum and Kleider Machen Leute. I had to go through line by line with a dictionary. Unsurprisingly my A Level grade was awful.

Lots of people who did French and German! I can’t imagine with the death of MFL in schools that that’s common any more. Kids at my school only take one language to GCSE.
I did L’Etranger (dear god Meursault was a prick and the teacher kept banging on about existentialism), Un Sac de Billes (quite good) and La Symphonie Pastorale (old man seduces blind young girl, she regains her sight, sees he is disgusting and commits suicide).
In German I did Andorra (forgettable), Death in Venice (ugly old man stalks beautiful young boy then dies) and Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (a parody of the rise of Hitler and bloody brilliant).
I reckon if we’d had to write essays in the target language, my German/French would have been better. It’s all practice isn’t it?

However you're not wrong about the jump between ALevel and GCSE.

Piggy I don't think you are right about German students discussing English texts in German. My kids are at international school in Germany and it offers the IB. Normally the IB students would do "Studies in Language and Literature" in their mother tongue and "Language Aquisition" in a different language BUT to make it the same as the Arbitur the native-German speakers have been told they'll need to swap that round and do the more advance language course in English not German.