please critique my letter to French teacher

[gramercy]

Is this worth writing? I was already worried about the crap French teaching in ds's school, but now I'm apoplectic. Will I achieve anything?

Dear Miss X

It was nice to meet you at parents' evening and to hear encouraging words about ds.

I remain, however, a little perturbed about his progress. I noticed at the weekend that his homework was to learn the present tense of avoir and etre. I am rather concerned that pupils are only at this most basic stage by the middle of year 8.

I wonder if you could reassure me that the pace of learning will accelerate?

Yours sincerely
Gramercy

My (Y5) Ds has been doing French on and off (don't get me started) for the last 6 years. They seem to think that they will just pick it up by exposure in the way they learn English, but in an hour a week (and not even every week) in a class of 30 doing songs and "Je m'appelle..."

When babies learn to talk they are so immersed in it, and hearing lots of different sentences, they do work out the parts of speech so that we expect them to be MAKING THEIR OWN SENTENCES within a year of starting to talk.

After 5 years of this rubbish French, DS still hears and repeats it as whole chunks. What a waste of time. I had hoped it would improve in secondary.

When I was at school in the 70s, French was mainly a written subject, but now they have gone too far the other way. BTW we had French every day for the first few years, so that the basics really sunk in.

However, the letter won't help. It needs the whole curriculum sorting out.

it's not the teacher you need to be speaking to - its the entire shambles of the NC you need to tackle. (good luck with that one)

She will either laugh at you or hate you

Either way it wont help!

I don't see why avoir and être shouldn't be run through quickly right at the start. It is SO important - loads of the early basic stuff they learn involves it - j'ai onze ans, etc...

Admittedly some may not understand the concept of conjugation, but they have to learn it some point, and IMO it will be far more confusing to learn it later after becoming ingrained with dodgy habits.

But I agree that writing a letter will achieve nothing. This goes much higher up than the teacher.

OK, thanks, no letter then!

I find it rather alarming that lessons are designed with the purpose of satisfying an Ofsted inspector who might randomly wander into the class.

I think the excuse 'it's the NC to blame' is a poor one. There is no reason at all why learning avoir and etre couldn't be set for h/w and then tested the next lesson with peer marking for OFSTED geeks.

Given that OFSTED isn't in the classroom every week, what's the problem in ignoring the NC and teaching properly, or using the NC as a framework and extending them. You'll get better residuals at GCSE that way.

How can a child develop any language skills if they aren't made to memorise a few basic verbs in the first term of year 7? I found the only way to help DD with French was to pay a tutor who gave her vocabulary lists to learn each week.

I am another one who is shocked by the low level of language learning at secondaries. After 2 years at a school with a good reputation, dd (who is a very bright child, and bilingual) was unable to say the simplest phrase in French, had no understanding of even the most basic grammar and had picked up the most appalling accent from her French teacher (yes, I know it came from her, I've heard her).

Compared to what my nephews and nieces have been learning at their Swedish schools, this is appalling.

What strikes me most is the low level of ambition compared to that of dd's other teachers. Her French teacher told us at the parents evening in Yr 8 that they would be studying the imperfect in Yr 9, but that most of the children (in top set!) would probably find it too difficult to learn.

I have never heard a maths teacher or a science teacher speak like this! Oh yes, understanding percentages is part of the GCSE curriculum, but I don't actually expect anyone to learn it, because it is really far too difficult.

I fail to understand why learning a few simple paradigms by heart is harder than learning the formulas for the various dioxides that pollute the atmosphere. And nobody has said that the children in top set are incapable of memorising that.

My son, who is 10 and in bottom set, is getting 1:1 remedial teaching because he has failed to learn his time tables- so this is evidently considered unusual and a problem. At the same time, dd, who is 14 and recognised as g&t is considered incapable of learning the much shorter list that is the imperfect of parler.

And if you think it is because English children have some kind of mental block about languages- well, dd didn't when she started. But having spent 2 years on classes and got nowhere, she does now.

Does anyone find that the lack of a good grammatical foundation in English is restricting how languages can be taught in Secondary?

Kids seem to think you are talking from another planet when you mention the first, second and third persons in their own language and then to add any tense onto it then to do declensions...

To teach etre and avoir in the present tense in Yr 8 for me does like a bit of an achievement for me considering where the lack of awareness of basic grammar when the children enter secondary.

BTW, I teach French and Spanish to yr 7 and the top sets have already been introduced to ser, tener and ir. Lower sets (past set 2) will just not thoroughly get it without support coming from the English curriculum.

No, I don't think that should make it impossible to explain the concepts when you start a new language, foxy. I speak a language which never distinguishes between the different persons when it comes to verb endings: it took our English teachers less than a week to explain the concept that in English you say "I am" but "he is". And we were only 10.

I teach at university level and I still never take it for granted that my students know any grammatical terms: but they will once I'm through with them

it is not impossible at all to teach it, but it is harder to make the metalanguage a part of their lexicon so that you can use it in your lexicon.

I remember learning the definitions first second and third persons at about the age of 7, singular, plural, past present and future tenses would not have been long after.

here kids can't even seem to remember that be, was, and being are all different parts of the same infinitive.

All that stuff ought to be taught in Primary, imho.

Imho it is not about what age things are taught; it is about with what expectations they are taught. The science teachers do not excuse their pupils' inability to grasp scientific concepts because they were not taught the metalanguage in primary: they just tell them to get on with it. The maths teachers expect them to take all sorts of complicated new concepts on board. Comparing what my dd does in physics to what she does in French is depressing- and it's certainly not because of any wonderful science drilling that went on in primary school.

I am a Classicist myself and if I may say so quite a good one. Since I came to this country I have frequently been told by colleagues that of course noone can really learn Latin or Greek unless they start in primary school. They are dumbfounded when I point out that noone in my country was offered the chance to learn Classics until the age of 16- and we have turned out some pretty good classicists. You can grasp the concepts of ablatives and vocatives at the age of 16; it's not too late. But you have to believe it is both possible and desirable.

I so often hear British friends explain that their children can't really be expected to speak French if they haven't had a chance to learn it since Infants. I point out that many of my friends started French in Sixth Form and were expected to speak it pretty well fluently after 3 years. But that was the crucial point: they expected to speak it, their teachers expected it, and it was something to look forward to.

of course it isn't about what age things are taught. it is the culture of language learning (including the culture of English learning) and teaching which affects how languages are viewed and the politics of teaching it as well as whether the wider society values language learning.

The sciences are valued in a way that languages isn't so the learn jargon and get on with it attitude is supported. (Speaking as someone who has recently lost 2 lessons to Yr 11 Science 'cram sessions' without prior notice.)

My DS got an A* in French at GCSE & went on to do it at AS in Y12 - he got a D in that, partly because of an uninspiring teacher (this has always been an issue with him ) but mostly because at that level they are suddenly expected to get all the grammar right, make adjectives agree with nouns, conjugate verbs correctly, know the right tense to use etc & he couldn't be bothered, & now he's dropped it. (His other subjects merely require knowing some things, having opinions on others, and writing essays )

If they had been taught the grammar routinely & repetitively from day 1, instead of all the conversational twaddle, it would have been ingrained by 16

Language teaching now is shit.

I am horrified by my dc's non-grasp of French after years and am now going to do it myself at home. With maths and science you HAVE to learn the basic equations and formulas to be able to progress, it is the same with verbs and grammatical structure. It isn't magic.

Drives me mad.

in addition, teaching the metalanguage to a group of yr 7 last year offers me no guarantee that my yr 8 group the following year will know the metalanguage. Because I am not teaching any bar one of the sets I taught last year.

Sciences and maths have the advantage that their metalanguage is built into the curriculum. Besides the very basics, in languages, it has all but disappeared.

For me the question remains, why isn't learning how the English language works is not valued in England?

It is unfair to compare language learning in sixth form as by then, one's learning experiences have shaped the mind to a point where older people can learn the basics faster and sixth form has selected out those with the commitment to it. not the same with 14 yos and under.

Oh, so sorry, in answer to the op, I wouldn't bother, resign yourself to doing it at home, yourself or with a tutor.

I'd say say that lacking the metalanguage for talking about language does make it more difficult to teach but not impossible.

In some ways if I have to explain a grammatical point mid-lesson to my students in English it's much easier because they all have a good grasp of the grammatical concept I'm talking about and are used to thinking of language that way. OTOH my teacher friends in England have enormous trouble explaining concepts because they can't use the shorthand to talk about it. If you have to spend half your time explaining the grammatical concept in English and then demonstrating how it applies in the second language you're not going to get going! One story which horrified me was someone on teaching practice whose class only clicked that lesson, from seeing that ils is the plural of il, that they is the plural of he. I'm sure the class did know it conceptually but they couldn't express it, and when grammatical understanding is that low in your mother tongue it's a barrier!

It goes even deeper than grammar. Morphologically speaking many English and French words are similar but many children have no understanding of morphology (I blame the bloody obsession with phonics for that) so can't look for the root of a word to find the similarities. Not 100% foolproof because there are faux amis but it's a strategy all the same.

But it's not just that which is the problem because that's fixable. It's the low expectations, the fact learning by rote is unfashionable, the focus on product based communicative approaches which never deconstruct the language.

If you only ever learn discrete chunks how are you supposed to analyse sections of language you don't know by breaking them down to identify bits you do and extrapolating what you don't?

in the sciences and maths in comparison, the metalanguage is taught from YR 1 - thinking that is when they learn odd and even numbers, for example and then built upon so by the time they get to secondary, they already have a body of jargon upon which to build.

So far, my daughter, yr 1 knows what a full stop is but not what it does.

2 days ago she saw my typing and asked what a comma is, and what is does.

By yr 6, the progression in learning drops of steeply about how English, and therefore all other European languages, works.

The expectations thing is so true - 'this is the subjunctive, here's a table of endings and the various tenses, it comes after 'que' but don't worry because you don't really need it for GCSE'

Now I live in France several things strike me about why that approach is so fundamentally WRONG.

It never occurred to me to get a tutor for DS2 but it would have made such a difference

Nowadays it is fairly pointless teaching children to conjugate a verb in a MFL too early, given that in English, children don't know what conjugate means. Try telling your average 12 year old to "conjugate the verb 'to be' " and see what response you get. They are starting to use Je suis, tu es etc through repetition and IMO, it is when this becomes entrenched that the teacher can then introduce the idea of conjugation and that you can do it with all verbs.

Aries, I think if they were to learn how to conjugate their verbs in English first, at some point in time would certainly make conjugations relevant at the stage you use in your post.

Sorry to keep banging on about how relevant I find knowing how one's own language works. Knowing that would support learning a second or third language to no end. By doing so it also reaffirms what they know about their own language in a matter of why it works like that, not just that it is 'just' how works.