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

Some things never change:

From Three Men on the Bummel - I think date around 1899

"For they have a way of teaching languages in Germany that is not our way, and the consequence is that when the German youth or maiden leaves the gymnasium or high school at fifteen, "it" (as in Germany one conveniently may say) can understand and speak the
tongue it has been learning. In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled.
An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able to tell the time, or make a few guarded observations concerning the weather. No doubt he could repeat a goodly number of irregular verbs by heart; only, as a matter of fact, few foreigners care to listen to their own irregular verbs, recited by young Englishmen. Likewise he might be able to remember a choice selection of grotesquely involved French idioms, such as no modern Frenchman has ever heard or understands when he does hear.

...

In the German school the method is somewhat different. One hour every day is devoted to the same language. The idea is not to give the lad time between each lesson to forget what he learned at the
last; the idea is for him to get on. .... He just sits there, and for his own sake tries to learn that foreign tongue with as little trouble to everybody concerned as possible. When he has left school he can talk, not about
penknives and gardeners and aunts merely, but about European politics, history, Shakespeare, or the musical glasses, according to the turn the conversation may take. . . .

Takver, that passage is genuinely amusing. And so true!

That passage is very amusing! Ah well, there is a curriculum issue - and one which I admit the current system addresses, or rather attempts to, by covering the topics which are necessary in order to communicate about oneself or in common situations in a country. What we fail at is all the incidental language. We can ask to reserve a bedroom, whether it has a bathroom and how much it is but when we get there we can't say the shower doesn't work and the price is more expensive than they said. But we can say in a completely situation that something is broken/doesn't work and something is more expensive.

Using artificial language constructions (like the classic pen/aunt example) to teach is a hot debate in the field of applied linguistics, especially no we have access to huge computer based corpora which give us real data and help us identify common patterns both in terms of grammar and words which commonly occur together. Many teachers still use rarefied teaching materials up to GCSE when after a couple if years it would be much more beneficial to use real exerpts from the news or podcasts. If you're learning about the weather the goal is surely to actually be able to understand that information when it's relayed in real life and discuss it, not answer a set of questions matching the picture to the extract while someone speaks slowly and clearly.

Have not read the whole thread tho' have read TMOAB - fab book!) but am shocked if they are learning avoir and etre for the first time in Year 8! ( Unless they start French y8?) how on earth can you write any sentences, or have any kind of conversation without those verbs, in any language???

More seriously, it does baffle me that other countries are able to teach MFLs effectively, yet we cannot. I don't think its reasonable to blame GCSEs - leaving aside Jerome K Jerome, I have a 'B' in O level German, yet have never been able to hold any form of conversation in the language.

Can we not just import a job lot of Danish or Swedish teachers or something & get them to design a suitable curriculum? What do you reckon, Cory?

I heartily agree that expectations are low.

I picked up a CGP French GCSE Revision book in Oxfam. I couldn't believe it was so... defeatist. It was written in a rather ingratiating familiar style and said things such as "I know it's a pain, but you really have to know the verb endings of .... " and "Here's a really tricky bit..."

Just learn it, fgs!

Its interesting to compare with, for example, the Wlpan Welsh courses which expect that with 4 hrs tuition a week you will be speaking simple but effective Welsh at the end of a two year course.

And yet that is with adults, who are I would say likely to find learning harder than young teens, and with Welsh, which is IMVHO a relatively 'difficult' language for English speakers compared to say French or Spanish.

(I have to admit that, embarassingly, despite having done the Wlpan I don't speak much Welsh, because I'm too shy to speak crap Welsh to people who of course speak fluent English - but I certainly understand more readily and am able if I need to to say more than I could have done after 5 years of school French lessons)

I am an MFL teacher and a home educator, so can see the differences in the results of NC teaching and teaching languages the way I want to!

What I find really annoying is the way colleagues look at me as if I'm mad when I do grammar teaching. I share quite a lot of classes and my HOD asked me to go over the past (grrr, she meant perfect) tense with top set year 8. Only the je form, only avoir and only regular er verbs. She'd started it the day before but they hadn't got it! They 'got' it within the hour and were working really well with it - the whole paradigm!

I don't think the point about not conjugating in English is relevant, Aries. DS2 and DD have just started doing it in English (using an American resource!) but have been doing it in French for 2.5 years; Spanish for 1.5 years and Latin for 6 months. They are 10 and 9.

Personally I find singing verbs to "The Mexican Hat Dance" very beneficial! There was a thread recently about Primary MFL where someone said "Of course I don't expect them to conjugate verbs at primary." Why not? They don't even need to fully understand them (although no reason why they shouldn't) - it's a song, they can sing it and enjoy it!

Fortunately I am 'responsible' for Year 9 Spanish (2nd MFL, top sets only) and have rewritten the scheme of work to build it around grammar. I looked at what I wanted them to know coming into KS4; put it in a logical order; then chose topics that would facilitate teaching the grammatical points. We're half way through the first year and it's going well. They are getting to grips with conjugations and adjectival agreement and seem to be enjoying the challenge.

Now all I need is for the French to follow suit!!

And Gramercy, I hate CGP revision books - they always seem to imply things are tricky - rather than just saying "You need to learn this, off by heart - you know, chant it, sing it, rap it, write it, whatever. Just learn it!"

Maybe I should write my own revision book!

Pedant alert : perfect is an aspect not a tense although we typically use the perfect aspect to refer to something in the past.

But asking you to revise 'the past tense', ouch! I'd have looked blank and asked which past tense she meant.

"I don't think the point about not conjugating in English is relevant, Aries. DS2 and DD have just started doing it in English (using an American resource!) but have been doing it in French for 2.5 years; Spanish for 1.5 years and Latin for 6 months. They are 10 and 9."

I suspect you were speaking to me instead of Aries here?

I also intend to teach the dd's now 5 and 2 the grammar of English using American resources. I agree that verb conjugations need to be learned, in which language is irrelevant imo as the metalanguage and grammar skils remain transferable in future learning, even if one one day decides to pursue Arabic or Tagalog for whatever reason later on in life. In the UK learning grammar, preferably in Primary, through English would be most accessible.

I'd rather they have competent MFL teaching at Primary too but I think that one will be a wish even more unattainable.

Whoops, sorry Aries. Yes, I would agree that it's easier and my DCs were certainly more on the ball with grammatical definitions than NC demands. I just meant that conjugating English verbs was less needful as for example in the simple past, the verb never changes (I walked, you walked, he/she/it walked). So it hasn't come up in our grammar resource until 4th grade (year 5), whereas it is IMHO essential, if you want to get anywhere with languages where the verb does change.

I think asking primary teachers to add MFL to their already overflowing workload is unfair. And some are hopeless/unenthusiastic. I was actually keen to get involved in primary MFL but the LA where I teach does not have a coherent policy as to how it's done with the result that it's very patchy. So they have to start all over again in year 7.

I did primary French back in the 1970s and it was fantastic. I had an inspirational teacher who had taken a sabbatical to learn how to do it properly. We mainly learned vocabulary and that was fine - it would mean that we could start with introducing grammar and structure in year 7 so they could build the vocabulary into sentences.

And for what it's worth, I learned to conjugate er verbs at primary. It did not put me off, it was not boring!