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 did O level French in 1979. The one book I can remember in 4th Year ( modern equivalent Y10) was called Chinois Blonde - excuse spelling etc !
Was a sort of detective / crime story.
Don't know if this was part of the syllabus or just something we did, reading this thread brought it back.
My DD is studying A level French and is reading a book with Tristresse in the title?

the dreaded Le Grand Meaulnes , iirc- God that was dull

Oh, BOF, thank you!! My schoolmates on FB were waxing lyrical about that pile of tosh a few weeks ago. I had to double-check we really had been at the same school!

Just gone and checked it is Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan.

Great choice for an 18-year-old girl, busymummy :)

I dropped French for A Level because we couldn't do literature. I do think it's a pity.

But we did the subjunctive for GCSE, and (as thefirst says, we conjugated verbs and didn't confuse them with nouns). So perhaps it's all swings and roundabouts?

Must admit I also found Le Grand M incomprehensible in any language. I remember dragging myself to a cinema on the other side of the city in the hope that the film would make things clearer. To this day I have not a clue ...

Technically, I'm not totally sure Mystere a Menton and the like actually count as novels.

Presumably if they did use past historic we were only taught enough to be aware of it when translating rather than being taught much about it or to conjugate verbs in it. I really don't remember it and I do remember the other tenses.

We definitely did past historic and subjunctive in Year 9/10 - the top set took French O-level in Year 10 and we all got As (selective girls' private school). What helped enormously with French grammar was compulsory Latin from Year 7.

The MFL lessons my children are being subjected to are such a colossal waste of everyone's time - the sole aim seems to be to get them through a (worthless) exam, but what is the point of getting an A or A* when they don't have the faintest grasp of how to hold even a rudimentary conversation??

Rafa, we were told the p. historic was becoming disused. I still see it in magazines & such, though, so perhaps it made a comeback.

I've always found the subjunctive hardest to teach English people, since ours is so atrophied. The concept's still here, but a lot of folks have great difficulty transferring it to a set of specified verb forms.

I have taught MFL for over 20 years.
I teach a lot of grammar, but you have to couple it with interaction, otherwise it's just dry theory and kids get bored.
It's not straightforward though. You can't simply teach everyone a grammar-based course. It simply wouldn't work for a lot of children I teach.
You and your children may be able to cope with the past historic at the age of 12, but I teach children who can't even recognise 'I played football yesterday' as a sentence in the past tense. You have to provide a suitable curriculum for those children too.
We have limited lesson time for MFL, most English schools have not given it priority for a long time now. Compare with other countries, and they start earlier and have more lessons each week than we do.
If the attitude towards language learning was as positive amongst the general population as it is on here, we'd stand a much better chance, too.

OP Could you find someone to teach your DD a little Latin grammar? It would help enormously with her French - she'd never be satisfied with pre-digested phrases afterwards ...

Oh! Hadn't seen basildon's post. Great minds ...

My guess is it was printed mid 60s and aimed at French 7-10year olds, garlic. A sort of French equivalent of Enid Blyton. Quite possibly it deliberately avoided use of the past historic.

I'm just trying to make it a bit interesting is all. And the idea is that it might be more fun if we learn to say "J'aime le foot, c'est fantastique. Je joue au foot le samedi" than if we sit there practising endlessly j'aime, tu aimes, il aime etc etc.

Sorry if I've got it right round my neck, but y'know, I teach 11yos (and 14yos as it goes) who can barely write their name in some cases, never mind tell me what an adjective is.

I don't personally think that the ability to conjugate verbs is as such going to help students a) pass their GCSE (helping them to do that is actually my job, ie the standard by which I am judged) or b) get by on holiday or when in a work situation and having to speak French to a French person. Of course we can't immerse students in French in 3 lessons a week - but we can encourage them to speak it and use it in those lessons, and conjugating verbs is not really going to inspire them. Or I haven't found that it does. Maybe I am doing it wrong (quite likely)

Thanks Sinclair btw

You can do both though, I think: "Tu aimes le football aussi?" and a run-through of the different forms of the verb.

I do appreciate that teachers are very pushed for time and under pressure to teach to the exam, though.

I suppose what we are reflecting on in this thread is whether the exams and syllabus at the moment really represent the best way to educate kids in another language. I wouldn't want to go back to the very dry and formal methods of chanting verb tables (my impression of the old O Level), but if it is all just context-based chat, I can't see that it equips students to understand anything about language structure. I'm not a teacher or an expert, but I really don't think that what my dd1 learned during her GCSE course got her to a reasonable standard of useable French, despite her A*, and it did seem better to me when I was at school in the late 80s.

I'm aware I sound like a fusty old bore, but that's my impression.

I agre with BOFster - I think it's really sad that kids are taught "j'aime le foot" and nobody says to them, "look, if you just know how to conjugate an er verb you can also write tu aimes le foot and il aime le foot and nous aimons le foot, and if you understand how negatives work you can also write je n'aime pas le foot, and if you learn a few extra verbs you can also write j'adore le foot or je deteste le foot, and if you learn a few extra nouns you can also write j'aime la natation or j'aime l'equitation..."

All those extra sentences for free when you only learned one.

I'm not a teacher and I only have French and German to O level. I haven't travelled abroad much so haven't had much occasion to speak either language, and would struggle to do it now.

Having said all that, the languages I did study to degree level were Latin and Classical Greek. There was (obviously) no emphasis on learning to speak these languages, it was all about reading (and to a lesser extent, writing) them. To do this it is absolutely essential to have a good grounding in the grammar. Knowing vocabulary is just not enough. You have to understand why the phrases that crop up again and again mean what they mean. Surely it's the same, and even more important, if you want to learn to speak and write another language?

Say your teacher gets you to learn off by heart a string of words which you are told means 'I have a sister who lives in London.' If you understand the meaning of each word in the sentence and also how the words relate to each other grammatically you can work out from that model how to put together another sentence which means 'I have a brother who works in Cambridge'. If on the other hand your understanding of the language you are supposedly learning is limited to just knowing that phrase parrot fashion with no grasp of why it means what you're told it means, that's all you know - just that one phrase.

It must be very difficult teaching an MFL to young people who are barely literate in English, and personally I can't see the point. However, the reason we study languages is not just so we can pass a GCSE with a C grade, tick that box and move on. The attitude to language learning in this country is abysmal. We should start earlier and give it more time and far more status. Controversially, I was delighted that Gove put a language pass into the English Bacc. Long overdue.

While I was giving my hobby horse a good long run, I see skylark has made my point much more clearly and succinctly!

GCSE MFL syllabi and examinations are a scandal.

Ten years or so ago, a friend of mine told me that her daughter had chosen her GCSE options. She was in year 9. She'd been studying one language since year 7 (comprehensive school in leafy suburb) and had decided not to take it in years 10 and 11. Hardly any pupils at this school took an MFL beyond year 9, presumably because it was seen as hard and boring. It didn't sound as if the school was encouraging them much, presumably with an eye on the league tables.

Anyway, because of this lamentable state of affairs, the school's policy was that the whole of year 9 would take GCSE in the MFL they were studying. They knew from the outset that most of them would struggle to get a G after three years of study, but they thought it would be good to have an extra GCSE on the record. Really?

(This isn't an anti-comp diatribe. My daughter's school was a comp and almost all the girls took both French and Spanish in KS3 and could take Latin from year 9 if they wanted. Good take-up of all three to GCSE, good numbers taking A level and a handful proceeding to do MFL and occasionally Classics at university.)

Whilst I understand that teachers have to gear lessons to all abilities, this is what rigorous setting and foundation/higher papers at GCSE should achieve.

We can't hold back our potentially able linguists so as to engage pupils with no aptitude or enthusiasm for the task at hand.

As for making it fun- well the reality is that becoming proficient at something usually involves a bit of labour. Take our that labour and you lose the proficiency.

And do you even engage the majority with the 'fun' approach anyway? MFL have never had such low take up rates at A level and degree level in state schools!

Compare that to schools which take a more traditional approach to languages ( both modern and ancient) and you will find not only better grades at GCSE but a higher take up rate going forward. Clearly, grammar is not putting off the punters.

It's not your fault clary - but what is the point of a French language exam that can be passed without a solid understanding of how to use verbs. And you do make the ability to conjugate verbs sound like some discrete and unnecessarily elite? distancing? show offy? old fashioned accomplishment. It's as if you're saying I don't personally think the ability to waltz as such is going to help them pass ... But it's not separate, it's intrinsic to any ability to manipulate the language. You learn six regular verbs; you have access to a million others. And you learn, if you haven't already, that you've been using diverse and complicated verbs throughout your young life anyway.

And why wouldn't knowing that be fun?

And who the hell said that learning is all about fun anyway?

I'm so damn slow ... Now I feel like part of a gang dragging clary round the back of the bike sheds.

I find it mind blowing that my French, which I stopped learning in 1978 at O grade (like GCSE) was better than dd's when she got an A in Int 2 (same level) two years ago. Better as in a wider vocabulary, more fluent speaking and better understanding of grammar, and I have used it only very occassionally since school, I have not practised it. As far as I can see language learning now consists of learning set phrases and matching them to set questions and looking words up in dictionaries. When I did O grade we had to look at a series of pictures, make up a story and tell that story orally for five minutes - talking continuously about an unseen situation, for 5 minutes. Dd has more chance of achieving unpowered flight for five minutes. Every European student I see speaks adequate to excellent English - why can't we teach our children anything of foreign languages? I'm sure there were plenty of pupils who did less well in French at my school but the teachers did not use the excuse that "not everyone could do it" to avoid teaching anyone anything.