Standard of French

[mutley1]

AIBU I am so angry about the poor teaching of French at DDs secondary school. They don't teach them how to decline verbs how to form different tenses etc etc they just have them copying great chunks of sentences out that the students have no knowledge of the meaning of and so cannot use the words to form other sentences. It's just hopeless. Anyone any experience/advice

I despair at the teaching of French, which both my DCs took to GCSE level. Back in the 70s when I took mine, I reached a reasonable level of conversational and written French, all based on a solid grounding of grammar. DS managed to scrape a C grade using Google translate and apparently very little knowledge of verbs/grammar. I loved languages and was very motivated to learn. DS hated it!

Part of the despair, for me, is knowing how beautifully learning the grammar of another language illuminates the - what should I say - the potency, and specificity and point of ones own language.

And this is why I am considering leaving secondary languages teaching - I hate the way we have to do it and even though grammar is coming back, I don't think that younger teachers are confident with how to teach it as they didn't learn it themselves until sixth form.

Controlled assessments are a nightmare and no test of language ability whatsoever.

And yes, I did literature for A level and coped (even though I hated studying literature in any language!) We had to read a simplified version of 'Les Petits Enfants du Siècle' in the summer hols before we started sixth form, so had a quick look at the past historic before we left year 11. Past historic is now taught at degree level!

DS1 who was home educated and learned French the way I would like to teach it is now doing A level and going over grammar that he knew by year 8. Vocab wise he's learning quite a lot; grammar wise he's learned nothing new this term.

This is interesting.

I had assumed DS's very rudimentary German homework was a reflection on where the teachers judge his ability to be. It seems that perhaps that's the kind of homework they're all getting?

Oh yes - I remember top set French doing the past historic in what would now be yrs 9 and 10.

Tinuviel I know a year 8 who is currently thrilled to be learning participles concurrently in Latin, Greek and French. Don't give up - find a better school. (She said, airily.)

Bring back tricolore. Today's teaching materials don't touch it.

I am so concerned by the standard of French teaching in schools that I send my dcs to French classes .

I have taught Secondary French and German for nearly 20 years. I love grammar and love teaching it. However, I wonder if maybe some of you are remembering through rose-tinted spectacles the glory days of being taught the Past Historic in year 9.

Except for during my stint in a private girls' school, many of the classes I've taught simply weren't bright enough to cope with anything but the basics of grammar in another language. And even then they mostly have great difficulty. Many of them have such poor spelling and grammar in their own language that expecting them to be accurate in a foreign language is just unrealistic.

Part of it is that they have practically no understanding of English grammar because, unlike pupils in France, Germany, Italy etc, they are simply not taught the grammar of their own language. This makes it very hard to teach them French or German grammar - they have no basis for comparison, nothing on which to 'hang' their knowledge.

Busted!

I admit it was a private (highly selective) girls' school.

I was in a state comprehensive (although it started out as a grammar school). This was in the early 1980s and I definitely did past historic at the end of year 11 - mainly so that we would recognise it in literature.

I think we massively under-estimate what kids can understand and am glad that grammar teaching is coming back, both in English and foreign languages but I think that younger teachers find it a challenge to teach as they weren't taught it themselves.

Oddly enough, as home educators we have used some great resources from the US on grammar, so maybe they teach it better over there!

I teach MFL at secondary. The current curriculum is uninspiring, and the methods of delivery are so teacher-intensive. Grammar, dictation and translation are creeping back in slowly but it will take a long time to reverse too many years of the communicative approach.
The GCSE is an abomination. It is a test of memory, not a test of language skills or knowledge. I hate it.
I always loved literature and I am trying to increase the amount of English teaching on my timetable. I am a better grammarian than many of the English dept who have no real grasp of the nuts and bolts of our language.

I went to a Catholic Comprehensive- I think we were just VERY lucky to have excellent teaching staff (the two who taught me are STILL there ), and you weren't encouraged to take up Spanish unless you were doing well in French. You are right that we don't learn much about grammatical structure in English though- by learning it in French and Spanish though, I've got a much better understanding of it than I would have otherwise.

Possibly they do, Tinuviel in both English and MFL. Grammar teaching in primary can be a bit hit and miss here. Some schools do it well others don't. Perhaps the new curriculum and the SPaG test will level that out a bit. Then at least you won't have to teach the English alongside the French or German etc.

I do know of one school who scrapped their KS3 SoW and rewrote it based on progression of grammar rather than topics. They then selected topics they felt went best with each grammar unit. No idea how that worked out for them though. If you can find the right school you might not have to consider leaving.

I did GCSE French in 1989 - second year of GCSEs. It was very much tourist French and very little reciting and memorising of verbs - we did some but not many. There was no reading of books in French.

However, as someone who as never going to go on and study French or other languages further, this was sufficient tbh. Even now, some several years on, I can get by on holiday in France. I can understand enough to tread simple signs. I can order and book things. I can ask and receive directions. I can have a basic "getting to know you" conversation, if they speak slow enough for me. I can go to the doctor or the pharmacy and get what i need, etc.

Is A level not still more about grammar and more technical language skills?

I'm in Germany, with two sickeningly bilingual kids (sickening because they are natives speakers in German to a degree I'll never be, but actually I'm quite proud of them) who go to school in a two-language school using immersion. Immersion works perfectly as long as it's introduced early enough - ideally at the start of primary school - and makes up at least a quarter of the school curriculum. But it still needs to be backed up with grammar lessons in both languages.

Grammar teaching and conversation practice are both useless without the other. If you teach phrases without grammar, there is no underlying structure which would enable people to form their own sentences and adapt language chunks. If you teach grammar without activating the language through conversation, it's nothing more than a particularly boring mathematical exercise with zero function apart form passing exams.

From what I can tell, language lessons in Germany have changed considerably over the last 20 years, but they're still not conversational enough, IMO. There's very little emphasis on spoken English. This may be because many many German teenagers go to the States or Canada (or the UK or any other English-speaking country) for six months to a year and learn the language fluently at 16. So they've already had the grammar in school, and then living with a host family in the country 'activates' that fluency. Compare that to the typical 'language exchange' in the UK, when kids go to the partner country for a week or two. In that time you can achieve very little apart from establishing that people do indeed speak this language in reality.

DD1 went to France for three months last year when she was 15. We arranged it individually, but it was a part of a programme supported by the school. She spent the whole of the first month in shock, failing to understand most things and finding it all a bit freaky away from us, then she turned the corner and came back absolutely fluent in colloquial and formal French. She's now doing the equivalent of French A-Level (and reading L'étranger , no getting away from that).

The two major problems with this kind of exchange in the UK are A. people are ridiculously overprotective with teenagers and unwilling to let them go abroad for longer than a week or so B. foreign languages are regarded as so unimportant that people can't think of any reason to learn them apart from being able to order food in a restaurant, and why would you go to school abroad to just learn that?

Hulababy, I did the same year as you, and we definitely did tenses and learned irregular verbs etc, and did some reading of French books (the dreaded Le Grand Meaulnes , iirc- God that was dull ). We really did have brilliant teachers- I'm pretty sure they dragged an A or B out of 28 of us from a class of 32.

I did some tenses and some irregular verbs - but nothing more than what 12y DD is doing now in her Key Stage 3 French. But definitely no reading of French books.

I remember pretty much every lesson involved a French textbook involving a family from somewhere in France - Dieppe maybe??

I wonder if there's a record of the syllabus (I think our exam board was AQA) online anywhere? I'd love to know if I'm misremembering things- maybe I am, and getting mixed up with the A Level course? I don't think so though.

I've skipped a lot of posts as I don't have children. I did want to say that, when I was at school in the Stone Age, we learned languages by using them - we read books, did 'conversation' and the school's policy was total immersion: we were not supposed to speak or hear any English in class. We did learn Latin as well, though, so the grammar in 'romance' languages was done more or less as an aside: do you see how this is an irregular verb? Notice how she uses the past historic to distance the events (cue 5 minutes on the past historic) and so on.

German had to involve a degree of rote-learning, sadly, and we read Goethe in bastard Hochdeutsch. Although I was fluent, I sat my German exams with various tables written on slips of paper up my sleeve

Anyway - I'm a committed fan of learning language by using it. Copying chunks of text, not so much.

I went to an academically selective girls' school and did O level French in 1977. I was in the top set and I think we probably did more grammar than the other two sets. (We all did French O level.) We definitely did the past historic and the subjunctive. I didn't do A level so it had to be in what we'd now call years 9-11. (We'd started French from scratch in year 7.)

My son chose to do Italian from scratch in year 11. I was astounded to learn that this wasn't a taster course, the entire set was going to go from zero to GCSE standard in (effectively) nine months. I was even more astounded when the GCSE results came out and out of about 30 taking the GCSE one got an A and the others all got A. Now OK, these were very bright boys who had only been allowed to do this GCSE because they were (a) good linguists, (b) hard workers, (c) already up to a high standard in another Romance language (A in French or Spanish GCSE) and (d) also familiar to some extent with Latin. Italian GCSE in 9 months would be less of a stretch given all of that.

But I'm afraid my principal conclusion was that the academic standard required to get an A* in a MFL nowadays is nothing like as rigorous as it was to get an A grade O level in the 1970s.

Hula, was it Nos Amis and the endlessly irritating Catherine Lardan and her friends and family?

God, how things stick.

Oh, I dunno, Mimsy. We had the option to take an extra language O-level in the lower sixth - I had a go at Spanish and Russian, but dropped out due to work commitments - and the expectation was you'd pass after one year. The classes were daily, and built on our pre-existing understanding of how languages work. Everyone who took the course passed with good grades. I'm still very good at learning languages now (and still hate those tables!)

We did the subjunctive, not sure about past historic. We probably did given that we did read some books in year 11. I'm pretty sure that wasn't standard for 1998 though.

We definitely weren't allowed to use English during French lessons. We probably did during German ones though but I only did 2 years of German and the second of those was a complete waste of time and I didn't learn much.

"Past historic is now taught at degree level!"

DD did past historic for A level (she took it last year), at about the same point in her school career that I did it in 1986 (i.e. early on in year 12). Similar for the subjunctive.

The difference, I suspect, is that I was at an open entry state sixth form and she was at an academically selective private school.

She did very little grammar at GCSE, still got an A*, and discovered when she started the A level course that she was rather behind her peers (she was in the bottom French set for GCSE, they'd all been in higher sets).

You couldn't read novels without the p. historic, surely? Maybe they just pick it up :) Think of the complexities in English mastered by a nine-year-old, for instance.