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Original poster

Blimey : MFL A levels have changed

134 replies

Piggywaspushed · 16/10/2017 19:44

Disclaimer : went to school in Scotland in the late Middle Ages.

I studied French and German as CSYS level (kind of like A2) and got As so considered myself good. But what my DS is doing now is really turning him off. we did three lit texts in French and German (this may have been more than we needed knowing my school!) and some history (German was east Germany and education , I remember; French I think was the resistance) But all our teaching was basically in English, certainly all our discussion of texts and I SWEAR we wrote essays in English!

DS can't even seem to learn grammar in peace now without it being related to some 'ishoo' and even his homework is set in detailed Spanish.

I know this is all very worthy - but it's no wonder kids talk about the gulf between GCSE and A level in MFL!

DS already dropped French after one week. He can't drop Spanish, not least because he got near as dammit full marks at GCSE. You wouldn't know it, though. He is really struggling, hates it and is now being supervised in free periods to force him to work...Blush there is no shame emoji so I went for blushing...

The teaching isn't great either, which does not help. Boys definitely respond negatively to weaker teaching much more than girls ime.

Anyone else share my his suffering?

OP posts:
Boulshired · 17/10/2017 10:57

My god daughter dropped German this time last year but still doing Spanish. She had found she didn’t have the confidence in the German class of all bilingual speakers. It has been so sad to watch as she truly believed being in an immersion environment would be really helpful but her confidence could not handle the gulf. Her A* in German didn’t prepare her enough. Her problem is her future plans and A level motivations involved languages and now she is doing Spanish as a filler whilst deciding what to do in university next year.

kitnkaboodle · 17/10/2017 10:46

Memory Lane! We did:
French: La Malade Imaginaire; Maupassant Short Stories - all good. Then Le Grand Meaulnes - never got what that was about; Le Noeud de Viperes: can't remember the author and found it pretty boring. But one image has always stayed with me. The narrator one night overhears his family plotting and scheming outside under his window at night. In the morning he sees the swirls that their chairs have left on the gravel and compares them to the trail that snakes leave. Bloody genius!
German: OMG - Die Neue ... Jungen W! Quite enjoyed that as it was very Catcher in the Rye but it was quite tedious the way that it kept referencing ...??? Goethe??? ... I don't think our teacher had a clue. I can remember a long passage about who is and isnt an 'echter jeanstrager'. Cant do umlaut! Also some awful dreary book set in a shipyard with an awful dreary shipyard cover. Any ideas?? Can't remember any other German texts. German was a bit of a scandal because we were all expected As and got Bs - even my mate who went to Oxford! Thanks for nostalgia trip!

RaskolnikovsGarret · 17/10/2017 09:51

I wrote long lit essays in the TL in German and French A levels in 1990. Didn't feel like a big deal. DD found it a big step up to A level, and found the discursive as opposed to spoon feeding style hard, but she has now got used to it, and is doing well. The GCSEs were far too easy to be a good prep for A level though.

It is hard to get good quality teachers though. I spend a lot of time correcting grammatical/spelling errors in DD's teachers' worksheets, and that's just with my ancient A level standard knowledge. I have checked, and it's not that my knowledge is out of date, the mistakes are genuine. It does concern me a bit.

RaeCJ82 · 17/10/2017 08:43

I left school in 1999 with an A* in French. I took A Level French and always regretted not dropping it and switching to something else.
I found the GCSE so easy but the switch to A Level was incredibly difficult. All our work and lessons were in French and I distinctly remember doing a module on agriculture in which we had to talk in depth about different soils. I ended up skipping lessons and came out with a C (A grades in other A Levels).
I wouldn’t advise anyone to take a MFL at A Level unless they are already near fluent in the language.

treaclesoda · 17/10/2017 08:40

We studied Therese Desqueyroux too. I can still remember having to quote something about her crushing her cigarette butt firmly underfoot, even though she was in a city, something about her being from the country and being afraid of starting a fire...

treaclesoda · 17/10/2017 08:37

I did French A level in the 90s. Like a previous poster, we had to write essays in French about various topics (social issues, the Maastricht treaty Grin, terrorism, anorexia in teenagers, environmental issues, that sort of thing). But for literature we studied the text in French, learnt key quotations etc but wrote the essays in English. It was crazy though, because literature made up something like 30% of the overall mark, which seemed ridiculous as it had so little to do with actually learning to communicate in the language. I would have really struggled to write the literature essays in French.

Eastpoint · 17/10/2017 08:36

I’m not as young as I feel too & did Phedre, Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard, Therese Desqueyroux & another book - can’t remember what it was. We did O level in Year 10 and then A/O in Year 11 so had the preparation of reading L’Etranger before starting A level. All the literary essays were in English. Dd has just started French Pre-U & is really enjoying it - she’s had to write two 1000 word essays so far, one on marriage & the other one on something environmental. She is going to study one book, one play and one film.

Eolian · 17/10/2017 08:34

Yes but they probably don't read Dickens at Abitur. They probably read shorter, more modern stuff and write about it in English

Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 08:31

to be clear, I haven't' told him that because he is a boy blah blah! I keep that to myself!

OP posts:
Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 08:30

2014 are you a teacher? have you read the research? it has been shown to be true.

Of course, some girls respond to poor teaching negatively, but they are more likely to be pro active about it and are shown to be more resilient, too, on the whole.

It isn't a generalisation. That does not mean, however, there aren't exceptions to the rule.

OP posts:
Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 08:27

I think I don't have an overview of his topics : this is what is frustrating me. He just seems to have started at the front of an A Level textbook : and I am assuming they don't do all the topics.

I wish teachers would give students outlines of what they will study as specifications can be unwieldy and obviously include a paradigm from which choices are made. But it may well be the teacher hasn't made some decision yet, of course.

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Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 08:25

I don't object to it per se but DS does. he is what I would call a 'pure' linguist. he likes the nuts and bolts of grammar and isn't too interested in people. to me, though, attaching grammar to topics does make it a bit drip feedy .

You are not correct that lit is an option : al the MFL teachers at my school are bewailing that they can no longer 'just' doa film. they have to do either 2 lit texts now - or a lit text and a film.

I am quite sure when German students read Dickens in English, they discuss it in German actually!

OP posts:
Eolian · 17/10/2017 08:19

Essays used to be in English, but that's pretty daft really, isn't it? I somehow doubt that students in France and Germany were writing their English essays in French or German.

It's not the teacher's fault anyway. They have to stick to the syllabus. I did a highly literary MFL degree, but I really don't think a heavily lit-based syllabus does most A Level students any favours and would turn many off. The current syllabus includes some literature but it's an option.

I'm surprised you object to teaching grammar combined with topic stuff. That's pretty standard right through from KS3 and has been for a looong time. It seems perfectly sensible to me that you would use the vocabulary from the topic you're doing to frame grammar practice sentences etc.

2014newme · 17/10/2017 08:17

I was in the first school year that did gcse French. Before we started on the a level work our teacher spent a term getting us to o level standard as the gulf between gcse and A level is vast. Gcse is easy, it's just about getting your point across. A level is a whole different ball game.

However I don't agree with your sweeping generalisation that boys respond worse to poor teaching than girls. What nonsense!

Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 08:13

I agree allegretto about the issues with GCSE. very frustrating. It also devalues Spanish and French results in my DS's head : and he is a glass half empty type anyway : so when we tell him how amazingly he did in Spanish and French GCSEs he just dismisses it.

OP posts:
EBearhug · 17/10/2017 08:13

I did A-levels in 1990, and I am still a bit bitter that we didn't have any lit at all for French.

MissWimpyDimple · 17/10/2017 08:13

Fail!

I did a MFL in the late 80s, early 90s at gcse a level and degree level.

The A level was BY FAR the hardest stage. The expectation to write complicated literary critique in the target language was so so hard.

The teaching was also very very poor and by two British blokes.

In the end I got an A, but I think that was a bit of a miracle.

MissWimpyDimple · 17/10/2017 08:10

In

allegretto · 17/10/2017 08:08

I did Mérimée's Colomba - lots of swashbuckling which our teacher acted out. Grin Molière - Le Malade Imaginaire and, I think, Racine's Phèdre - but I might be mixing that up with what I studied at uni.

I agree that the lit essays should be in English but the language ones in French - I don't think they mind so much what your opinion is on smoking/the environment etc -it's more a chance to show that you can argue effectively in a foreign language.

I don't know what the situation is like now but I think the problem for us was that lot of GCSE teaching was done by rote - learn these phrases to use in a café, for example whereas by A-level it was expected that we knew how the language and grammar actually worked! That is one of the reasons why I gave up German - at GCSE my teacher didn't teach us the cases (pretty important for German!) as we could (and did) get top marks for memorising useful phrases. This didn't work for a-level though!

Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 07:18

I will keep hold of the idea that he has two years to get there! :)

OP posts:
Original poster
Piggywaspushed · 17/10/2017 07:18

I'm not sure I agree that the lit essays need to be written in the TL : surely what they are showing is an appreciation of lit , having read it in the language? Does it not lead to a load more rote learning? I teach film studies and I must say the film questions in French A level are not really any different from the actual A level film studies questions!

But it is what it is. My DS's GCSE results weren't great but he has always done well in MFL so had to take them really. there isn't a huge choice of A levels at his school. I honestly thought he would be OK with an A* but you are right: he got there by being very very good at rote learning (pity he didn't apply it to other subjects!) and having lots of lesson time to do precisely that.

Not everyone who does MFL at A level goes on to use it beyond school but that had been his original plans : sadly, not now so now he is left with no clue about his future.

For those who want to play let's compare : I did Katharina Blum, Biedermann und die Brandstifter (loved!) and Die Neue Leiden des Jungen W in German A level and Baudelaire (pervy!) , La Peste and Rhinoceros in French. I really enjoyed the lit. It was always going to be his sticking point but I am hopeful for the film. He doesn't know what film he is doing, though, which is annoying me.

OP posts:
allegretto · 17/10/2017 06:25

Gu24 - I had the same experience. I can remember learning lots of quotes in French to work into my essays somehow in the exam! The French language essays make sense - how else can they show that they can write French without writing it?

allegretto · 17/10/2017 06:21

Why do the parents have to speak French?

Pythonesque · 17/10/2017 06:16

I'm disappointed for my niece who has just started 3 yr GCSEs in year 9 - she's dropped French already (no other languages) - why? When her parents asked at a parent-teacher evening what they did for those whose parents didn't speak French they had nothing to offer and no interest. For GCSE! A real shame.

GU24Mum · 16/10/2017 23:08

clary I must have done my French A level about the same time as you too! We wrote language essays in French but lit ones in English. I definitely remember tedious amounts of essays on smoking etc. In fact I''m pretty sure most of the literature part of my degree involved essays written in English!

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