The year award for French ....

[Pickledeggsandcheese]

Goes to Nicole

Whose parents are French, who's 1st language is French,
Well done year 9 teachers - you couldn't make it up

[yourerubberimglue]

And there were 400 children in our year

[yourerubberimglue]

She was the best in French ... I remember the parents like you - in one year I got English, History, Chemistry and Drama .. my friend Megan got Geography, French, Biology, RE and Music ... so many complainers and people saying bit was fixed ..... we were the best , sorry your child wasn't as good at it. Not our fault.

[MeanAger]

Cringe for argeles. You were that child.

[MaryTheCanary]

Same situation here, Pica (English-speaking child being raised in non-English-vernacular country), and I totally agree with you. I'd be embarrassed if my child won this kind of award and I think most older kids would be, too.

If a child speaks French at home but is still not really native level, and has really tried hard to improve their literacy/high-level reading comprehension, spelling and so on in French and the school wants to recognize that, then fine, but use a different award to do that. "Award for Hard Work in Non-School Curricular Area" or something.

[PicaPauAmarelo]

I'm going to go against the grain here. We live abroad, where English is not the first language. If any of my children won the award for English then I'd complain to the school, what a totally useless waste of the award. The other children would rightly think "what's the point in trying?". The real achievement should go to a child who has actually achieved something. It is the equivilent of a 14 year old English child getting an award for knowing a sentence should read "I went to the park" instead of "I be to the park", hardly an achievement that a native child could be immensely proud of!

[mugc4ke]

English in school is not taught as a Modern Foreign Language. French is. this comparison is seriously lacking.

[spaghettithrower]

If the criteria for the prize is that the person with the highest mark wins it then you can't refuse to give it to Nicole if she was indeed top.
There was a girl in my year who was bilingual French-English and was top in French every time. The school awarded the prize jointly to her and the "runner-up".
The lessons are probably a waste of time for Nicole but maybe there is no alternative due to timetabling or whatever and perhaps the school sees it as a positive, helpful thing having a native speaker in the lessons.
Personally I think the prize should have been awarded jointly but I don't think OP should make a complaint about it or anything.

[bridgetreilly]

I'd be livid if I were her parents and she hadn't been given that prize.

It's not always about effort, sometimes it's about achievement.

[GreenHillsOfHome]

It's a bit like complaining that someone who is English won the English language award...

Totally NOT the same. The UK French GCSE is a course/exam aimed at students learning French as a second language. It's possible to get an A* in a MFL GCSE and be no where near fluent in the actual language so a fluent French speaker would be pretty much guaranteed a top mark, presuming they can write three paragraphs about a day trip or their favourite food or the like.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

You don't have to know and analyse any literature for French GCSE, pirate. That's the point. They're not the same qualification.

It may have been different when you were at school but there's no literature or texts involved now and definitely no analysing of those texts.

CIE do a French Alevel for mother tongue speakers which might be the equivalent. They may also do an iGCSE but I can't remember.

[MaryTheCanary]

LadyinCement: I think they can't tell, a lot of the time. But if someone's name appears to be Bengali etc. and they have a qualification in that language, I think universities often kinda "disregard" the qualification in question. The "obvious" cases get weeded out in this way.

And it is very unfair in a way, because it could be that young Rana did not grow up speaking Bengali at all (plenty of minority group members do not speak a minority home language) but developed an interest as a teenager, yet she risks having her hard work ignored. I suspect it is easier for white teenagers to pass under the radar. I don't know what the solution is.

I do think that there has been a move for schools to stop putting teenagers in for home-language qualifications, perhaps because of the above. And Polish A-level I think has been scrapped altogether--due to lack of demand. I suspect that Polish parents were becoming worried that if their kids did a Polish qualification, it would make them look like a soft candidate who wanted to bank an easy A, and that is perhaps the reason for the fall in demand.

It is complicated, because minority-language speakers vary enormously in their proficiency---some may be no more than passively bilingual to start with and may not necessarily find it easy to walk into an exam room and get a great score. Yet the stigma remains.

I don't know exactly what the answer is, but if we returned to the UK I would encourage my daughter to do my country's "proficiency level" exams in the language, which are aimed at foreigners learning the language but are far more demanding than GCSE/A-level, and much better suited to native or semi-native speakers.

[Piratesandpants]

Cir - I thin you're the one being dim. How does being French help her know and analyse the literature? She has to do the same work as everyone else

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

Depends how you are defining best though, Tilapia.

Sharing the prize would probably have been a better idea if the reason Nicole got it was because she came top.

I sort of agree with you, deux but in this case the teachers do know. Which is part of the problem. Because in yr 9 Nicole's prize will be seen as less because she's essentially just got 'the prize for being French'.

[Cirandeira]

A number of people here either dim or being deliberately obtuse.

Learning a second language, and the study thereof, is entirely different to studying your native language and its complexities and nuances. English children studying English lessons is not the same at all as English children studying French lessons. Or do you really think French kids rock up in Year 7 to be taught the colours and numbers?

"French" isn't "French as a First Language and Therefore We'll Be Delving Into Language Complexity and Dissecting Literature and Poetry". It's "French as a Second Language." If English Year 9s were put into "English as a Second Language" with French children of the same age, they'd find it very dull and very basic, because it's for second-language learners, a whole different ball game to analysing your native one.

She shouldn't even be in "French as a Second Language" classes. Schools these days, however, are now known to stuff native speakers into GCSEs for easy points, as they're writing "3 lines about what you did on your holiday" or labelling the parts of the body.

Yanbu OP. It's basically cheating.

[Piratesandpants]

I'm half French. I won the French prize at school. I loved French and worked very hard in literature - my achievement wasn't down to speaking a bit of French to my family when visiting them.
It's a bit like complaining that someone who is English won the English language award...

[LadyinCement]

The trouble is, MaryTheCanary, how can institutions tell? Unless someone's name is Michel DuPont it isn't immediately evident. Dd's best friend's mother is French, but you would never know from her name.

Actually there seems to have been a good bit of entente cordiale round these parts a few years ago as both ds and dd know quite a lot of people who are half French. It was one reason why ds decided against A Level French as half the class had a French parent. Ds's friend did A Level German and he is German. That was an A* in the bag!

[TheFifthKey]

I'm aware of that - I'm a teacher. Equally though, many don't.

[Tofutti]

But as an EAL student she might find that she's never going to be able to get an award in any other subject...

Eh?! Lots of kids with English as a second language excel in school, often more than kids with English as a first language.

[pigeondujour]

I'm British and I won the French award every single year at school, except for one year when they awarded it to another student whose home language was French.

My parents and I were livid, and complained to the school.

This is a great story to tell people, especially now you're an adult.

[GreenHillsOfHome]

It seems a bit pointless in Nicole even doing a GCSE in French tbh because it would be French as a second language...pretty meaningless for someone already fluent in the language.

[gallicgirl]

I hate achievement awards and I say that as someone who won loads of the feckers at school. As much as I loved spending the book tokens, I recognised it wasn't fair. I didn't achieve because I tried hard, I was just lucky that I was intelligent enough to do well without a lot of study. I really think awards should be dished out to students who have improved a lot, put lots of effort in or helped others.

[MaryTheCanary]

It's actually an interesting philosophical point which ties into the whole question of "Why do we learn foreign languages?"

I do know that universities treat a GSCE/A-level in a "home" language differently to one in a language that the student did not grow up speaking--partly because universities are often interested in MFL not so much because of what the student can do with them, but as a "marker" for academic seriousness.

If we went back to the UK I would not want my child doing a GCSE in her other language as I have heard it can send out the wrong message. And I don't think I would want her getting an award like this. It just feels a bit wrong, somehow.

[Tilapia]

If you gave all the other prizes to the child who is best in that subject, except the French one, that wouldn't seem fair to me.