Bemused by my year 8's French teaching!!

[conistonoldwoman]

Can anyone give me a liitle insight into how French is taught in high schools?
My DD comes home with pieces of written homework to complete . There are English phrases and their French counterparts. Tonight she had to make up a weather report using these stock phrases. She cannot pronounce any of the French correctly and really only knows what it means because she has the English translation in front of her.
What emphasis is there on oral practice? Surely there should be loads of spoken French before introducing the writing.

Sorry 'they'

I have posted on this very subject a few times in the past.

I am appalled at ds's French - and he is hailed as being the best in the class! It really grieves me that children are being let down so badly.

French (and I suppose other MFL too) just seem to be "holiday courses" such that you might do at an evening class.

I can still remember that my O Level French exam in (ahem) 1980 included the instruction to write a short essay on a tiger escaping from a zoo. I think I filled up half the paper with people shouting "Au secours!" and "Sacre bleu!"

That's not quite the situation, Slambang. There is no writing paper in GCSE - there are 2 pieces of controlled assessment, which have to be produced by the pupils but the teacher should not be checking them - they can give general feedback along the lines of 'check your adjectives/verbs' but nothing more specific than that. The same applies for the 2 speaking assessments. They can, however, take a crib sheet in with them, with up to 30 words in bullet points/spider diagram.

Not that I am saying the exams are difficult, just that they are not quite as easy as that!

There is nothing to stop a parent from writing their pre-prepared assessment though, is there?

At the moment, no! Although the preparation is done in a classroom situation for up to 5 hours in the 2 weeks before the assessment, pupils are at liberty to take their work home. Having said that, I know my pupils' capabilities and if they produced a piece of work that I had any doubts on, I would question it/compare it with what they had produced within the classroom situation.

I think a fairer way of assessing would be to have a final exam with one pre-prepared piece of writing and one that had to be done on the day. But I also think that the lack of translation in exams isn't a good thing either. It is a useful skill and one that is sadly undervalued. We only had to do MFL into English at O level, then English into MFL at A level.

What a can of worms I appear to have opened! How do you begin to challenge anyone in 'authority' to investigate the poor quality of ML teaching? I agree, breathe slowly, students need to be immersed totally in the language.
Thanks coastgirl for your insight.
I do have sympathy for anyone teaching a foreign language to high school students. I think they become less and less receptive as they reach this age and are notoriously self conscious when it comes to speaking.
However, as a KS1 teacher, I know children absolutely love being exposed to another language, and absorb so much.
Do high schools encourage exchange trips like they used to? This was such a good way for pupils to accelerate their learning.

Another problem is a lot of kids (according to my sil, a MFL teacher in an averagey school) keep asking "Is this in the exam?" when they learn, for example, the future tense or parts of the body, as if language learning could be equated to gambling on Henry VIi's foreign policy coming up in the History GCSE. She told me that the "Bitesize" ethos is so ingrained in them now that they can't grasp the value of the long game. If they are told to learn some irregular verbs for a test, they'll do that, but will be outraged if two weeks later they are required to apply their knowledge.

That is very true, Gramercy. My way round it this year with my year 9 Spanish is that every lesson, someone (picked at random) will have to come out and write one of the verbs we have learned on the board (so far we have only done 'to have'!) and we will see how well they remember it. They are a nice crowd, who I taught last year, and I know that they will be supportive of each other. I wouldn't necessarily do it with every class I have! But it does mean that they will have to keep things fresh in their minds!