Anybody know how large the cohort of native speakers is for A level French?

Coming at it from the other side, we live in France and my dd, despite her native English, is not top of her class as she doesn’t want to put in the graft. Top places go to the highly motivated and diligent students.

We are surrounded by bilingual/ trilingual( and more ) people. Most have perfectly average jobs. It’s what you do after your language degree that shape for stardom. Being fluent in two languages is just beginning.

Also there's no such thing as top grades reserved for native speakers or even quotas, especially in Covid times when the exam board grade boundaries appear on the face of it to be more generous.

I'm an MFL teacher and can tell you that native speakers tend to struggle actually with A-Levels they don't prepare to the same extent as non native students, particularly for essay writing and speaking, which in theory they should be better at. So often they don't get as great grades as they could (despite extensive intervention but that's another story).

Non-native speakers should absolutely not in the slightest be put off from doing A-Level as it's perfectly possible to get highest grades without being a native speaker. As with any subject in the sixth form, hard graft and effort will get you places and MFL is no different.

I did A level English (not in the UK), and I'd say don't let your child be disheartened by the amount of native speakers in her course. If she is passionate about languages and puts in a bit of work, she can excel! And it's now easier than ever to practice with Netflix shows in French, online French newspapers and radio. If you live near a bigger city, there'll be a French community that you can join to meet him I fuel families, celebrate important events throughout the year and extra lessons.

*nerd

I confess I'm a language net but in 6th year at high school in Scotland I actually did an evening class at a local library...just to say that there are other routes... French institute, Goethe Institut etc...everyone does online classes now, Duolingo, watching reality the in other languages is brilliant...school isn't everything. Good luck.

When my son was researching uni courses , we noticed that some of them wouldn't allow native speakers which was interesting

MFL teacher here and would agree with what is being said. Native speakers are definitely not normally our top grades although they often do better than their predicted grades which may be quite low in some cases. French is particularly tricky as it sounds so different to how it is written. They often have no interest in the literature side of things and may be studying other subjects which don’t really match. French is quite academic and they may be doing BTECs or more practical subjects for their other subjects and find the analysis and essay writing required quite challenging (this is not me being snobby, I know there are many different challenges required at BTEC). There is also often an arrogance as people have mentioned and a tendency to not listen in the grammar lessons. This has been my experience although this year I have a very academic native speaker who listens and applies grammar rules and is flying!

It's 20+ yrs since I left school so my experience may well be out of date but I would say that it's really important to check the course content. I did A level French & German.
For GCSE, it was mainly language skills. Therefore, the native speakers had to do little but walk into the exam hall and come out a few hours later knowing they had an A in the bag.
For A level, the course was very different as it was literature and language skills. Being a native speaker gave you a massive advantage but you still needed to have read the books, understand them and write essays about them. The skills you needed were similar to those for English literature so, if your DD doesn't enjoy or struggles with that, you need to be careful what the course content for A level is. Also, whilst I'm not sure how the mark scheme wrote, you had to have some understanding of, for example, politics to be able to write a decent essay about it.
At my school, the massively dissuaded native speakers from doing a core A level in their native language as so many Universities (again, back in the day) would effectively see it as a lesser qualification.

Thanks! @user1471519931

None of the students taking French A Level at the school I work in are native speakers.

Every kid who got a good grade at DD's school had French ancestry bar one whose parents sent her to French summer school for 8 weeks between GCSEs and a levels plus had a tutor. Dd got a c despite a * dropping only 4 marks total at gcse. We don't have French ancestry. I actually think the French native speaker cohort should be sitting a separate classification

@belimoo work for a large international organisation in the communications department. Something like UNESCO.

@MFLMum2021 I have worked in a number of jobs over the years including international student recruitment, EU postings in Brussels, tourism and PR. In all of my jobs, being able to speak two languages in addition to English definitely made me a more attractive proposition. There's a world of opportunity out there. Good luck to your daughter!

I think you are worrying unnecessarily. The fact that some of the children hear their parents language at home does not mean the parents had the time to regularly sit with them to teach them how to write it or how to read it properly.

It also depends on the teacher, some are good and some are not. Some are really really bad, so even speaking French at home some kids do not have a chance in hell to get a good grade unless their parents are prepared to do the work the teacher should be doing.

@MFLMum2021, the DD of a friend took Spanish and history with year abroad at a good university and got an internship at a City bank. Now flying high as an analyst.

OP maybe I’m being naive, but why would there be a quota for top grades? Or do you mean that the standard for A* grade might be set higher if there are native speakers?

My DD is doing two MFL A levels, and currently predicted A* grades in each. She has pretty much learnt everything from school - and doing things like watching films and tv, listening to music and some reading in the relevant languages. The group of pupils doing language A levels is relatively small compared with other subjects, but most of her classmates are definitely not native speakers of the languages.

@Mojoj, would be interesting to hear what you have done career wise. DD will be studying languages at uni, but doesn’t yet have much idea what she’ll do after job wise.

@savagebaggagemaster - that is interesting. I must admit that my own experience of this with a near-native speaker in my A level class was that he was pretty lazy and didn't do spectacularly. However, while he might not have troubled the top students in terms of competing for A grades, he did still get a grade that wasn't commensurate with his learning or effort!

The system was fairer at uni, where I did another language ab initio. Absolutely no native or advanced speakers in the beginners classes. Anyone with prior knowledge of the language did a placement test, meaning they skipped years of the core language classes or didn't take them at all.

Mu DS did A level French and got an A*! He had only had a school trip to France but kept in touch with someone he met there which helped.

If your daughter does decide to do A level PM me and I will see what resources we have. I know he made LOADS of flashcards etc.

My DS is taking A level French, and anecdotally sees quite a few who are French mother tongue at various schools. They are a bit in awe of him doing French. The main issue we had was getting any commitment from school that they would run the course. Numbers at many of the local schools have been around the 2-3 mark in recent years.

Encourage her to study languages. I am a linguist and have had an amazing career, full of travel and adventure. It always makes me smile when I hear people saying "no point learning other languages, everyone speaks English don't they?". They don't know what they're missing....😍😍