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

Again and again you hear teachers saying they can't teach this or that because it's hard or that it's not accessible to all pupils, or even [scream!] that it's not fun. Meanwhile, those who can, or even those who profess to not be able but could if pushed, miss out.

Modern language teaching also encourages the narcissist! It's all "I". As in, "J'aime les glaces," or "Je n'aime pas le sport," etc etc. No one else exists!

As to the ability of our European friends, well, they have a head start. I'm sure if many of our tv programmes and nearly all of our popular music was in, say, Dutch then we'd be fairly familiar with that language. As it is, most people never come across any French at all in their day-to-day lives.

Ah, the days of the unseen translation. One key word you didn't know and you were f**d.

And we had to write a short story on a given subject. I still remember mine was "A tiger has escaped from the zoo..." I remember that my essay consisted of many "Au secours!" to fill up the space!

"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..."

Of course we say exactly this to them! clary too! It's how the progress. Clary was just giving an example of the starting point. What has been written above is EXACTLY what we do next! In fact, what you have written are exactly what my Y8 class have been writing/saying in the topic of free time and leisure....

My spoken story was about a woman falling down stairs, breaking her leg, going to hospital in an ambulance and ending up in a hospital bed with a nurse giving her a cup of tea, not knowing the French for broken leg, ambulance and hospital was a slight handicap, luckily the last two are easily guessed. The written essay, a page of continuous prose, was, thankfully "My trip to Paris" which I had more vocabulary for, I still recall the trauma of finding the lift at the Eiffel Tower broken! Quel dommage! Nowadays they are allowed dictionaries all the time so unseen translation loses its sting! Too much to ask to learn page after page of vocab.

I did 9 years of French at school. I struggled so much with A level that my D grade was an achievement. I thought I was just crap at French and my A level teacher agreed and made sure I, and the rest of the class, knew it.

A few years ago I had a year in Paris as an au pair for a bilingual family who wanted me to speak only in English with the children. I worked on average 50-hour weeks so didn't have as much opportunity to speak French as I had anticipated.

But I did attend French classes for 5 hours a week for 9 months. I am still by no means fluent but my French is good now. The lessons were conducted completely in French by French people. I suddenly found that learning French was within my capabilities and that a lot of what my bullying A level teacher had taught us was wrong, both in turn of phrase and pronunciation.

I now enjoy reading French novels and can have a conversation if others speak clearly and feel that if British kids had the excellent teachers I had in Paris they could get from nought to better than A level standard in two years.

As for my A level teacher, I fantasise about bumping into her and telling her in perfect French what I think of her ridiculing me in front of the class so much that I just stopped going to her lessons because I was petrified!

fourcornered I was responding to this:

I don't personally think that the ability to conjugate verbs is as such going to help students a) pass their GCSE

In clary's second post. I'd find it hard to interpret that as a reference to the starting point.

The Grand Moan. Awful.

My private school had three sets. Unusually the bottom set took CSE. (Almost all other subjects were O level.) I used to envy them their more practical 'holiday' syllabus, but welcome the added understanding of grammar. Top set took the O level early giving more time for A level.

Languages for my dyslexic daughter were a real trial. I ended up searching out the side bars in her French text book to teach her the grammar to allow her to decode the phrases she had to learn. There was no grammar at all in her German text book and by the end of her first year she did not know the present tense of the verb to be. Her brother had much more formal teaching with tough weekly tests of grammar, vocabulary and phrases, so we used his text book. Dd then spent much of the summer before GCSEs learning a set number of words each day, along with the grammar. Even then the learning of set passages for the oral was tough and took up a disproportionate proportion of her GCSE revision time. That is despite her having a genuinely good ear for language.

The reward is that she is reasonably confident speaking basic French and German. Indeed recently was able to help some lost French tourists. (They gave her 20 Euros as they were so relived when she got them to the Gatwick Express in time for their flight!) She also got A*s which she may need when applying for a competitive sciency course.

But it was essentially home ed. The current approach seems to give real advantage to kids whose parents who speak languages themselves and who want the same for their children, and those who have the resources to organise plenty of exposure.

Except you have misquoted (and misunderstood)... a) pass their GCSE (helping them to do that is actually my job, ie the standard by which I am judged) she's quite right, they don't need to be able to conjugate millions of verbs in all persons to gain a grade C (a pass) This is the result of the syllabus and how they are tested. Students that achieve As and A* do more. They are all taught the same syllabus but while the C grades are still getting to grips with I and we forms in each tense the stronger students are pulling ahead - forcing the E/D/C grade students to learn nothing but grammar limits them because they don't have the nouns to go with them and they don't have the dictionary skills to do it themselves. That's not because teachers in MFL (or indeed, English) don't teach them these things but we are judged on a strict set of criteria and there simply isn't time to be all things to all people.

Many classes at GCSE level are mixed ability - the most common grade in MFL is a C - both target and achievement. As long as the vast majority of students get their target grades (or better) we are doing everything that the system expects us to do. It doesn't mean we agree with all of it but we can't just change it, that's what the students, and we, are judged by.

forcing the E/D/C grade students to learn nothing but grammar

Has anyone on this thread really suggested that?

A few have said that it was how they learnt and it worked for them. What a lot of people remember and what they say they still remember are literature components - which won't help the average student either. None of the previous posters have said 'I got a C/D at O-level' - I think that many of the pervious posters were academic students and their experience isn't that of the 'average'.

I am comparing like with like, both dd and I got A's at the same stage in French, she knows next to nothing. Something is broken in MFL teaching and assessment if her ability is now considered excellent.

But four I have two children who are currently learning MFL in a more traditional way for want of a better term and they are both enjoying their languages and highly skilled in them.

Both will take at least one further to A level.

Some schools are teaching this way with excellent results.

I accept of course that your own hands may well be tied in this matter. The school will have policies on far off piste you are encouraged to go.

They both also study literature too!

chemenger What does your DD say when you tell her she knows next to nothing?

DD agrees about her ability, we laugh about it! She was shocked when she got an A. She's very good at other things, and probably would have been good at French if it had been taught more systematically. She was much better at Latin, which was taught very traditionally.

How the fuck does someone still getting to grips with the I and we forms in each tense, presumably after 2-3 years at KS3 manage to get a C? Have we really devalued the GCSE that much?

No one is saying you should only teach grammar. Just that is isn't being taught well at the moment. Students aren't going to fail their GCSE because you've taught them grammar. On the contrary I'm willing to bet you might get better results if you stop only teaching children to pass the GCSE, because they will actually be able to speak reasonable French.

I am a lecturer in classics at a very good UK university. We do quite a lot of beginners' teaching for students who didn't have the opportunity to do Latin or Greek at school. Our students all have at least AAB at A level and excellent GCSEs (almost always including at least one MFL) but we have to assume a starting point of zero grammar knowledge - we can't even assume that they will know the difference between a noun and a verb, an adjective and an adverb, so we have to teach these concepts in English in the first few days. The ones that do have some knowledge of these concepts often come out with phrases that suggest that what they learnt dates back to effective primary school teaching - e.g. a verb is a 'doing word'. This suggests that for most of our students who did not have the chance to learn Latin at school - that is, in practice, mostly state school-educated students - there was no formal grammar content in GCSE MFL teaching.

It is part of my job to assess the likely language aptitude of incoming students who have never tried to learn an ancient language: after a few years of data gathering our guidelines now state that an A or above in a GCSE MFL has no particular predictive power (!), although a B or below tends to predict outright failure in our beginner language modules. An A in a MFL A level is an advantage (as you'd hope it would be!), especially in e.g. German (probably because German word order is less like English and more like a classical language). But the numbers doing German have fallen off a cliff in the last few years - I think I am right that fewer students do A level German than Latin now. Certainly A level German has become, like classical languages, almost completely confined to private and grammar schools.

kalidasa. I think you're right. My DD was the only one in her A level German class. There were two classes of Spanish students.

My DD is in CM2 (Year 6) at a French-English bilingual school in Paris. She has done conjugation in French since CE1 (Year 3) and will continue to do so into secondary. She does plenty of grammar and is regularly tested on parts of speech and sentence construction. She also learns Spanish and has started conjugation in a big way. It's impossible to learn MFL without a good grounding in grammar.

I learnt this way and got GCSE A*, A at A level and a 2:1 at a good university through the current system (I'm 29). I have a masters in linguistics and professional qualifications including a PGCE. I'm also leading a successful department in an average comprehensive in an average town in Northern England with an above national average GCSE pass rate and an above national average take up at post 16 for MFL but clearly you all know better than me about how languages should be taught. This is the way we teach, I'm not saying it isn't limited and I'm not saying it is the only way. I'm just trying to say that it works for what we have to achieve for them according to what those above us want them tested on. The syllabus is about to change dramatically with a return to some if the methods/tests used previously, I'll probably be having this conversation again in a few years time when people are saying 'but X worked fine for me, why did they change it". At which point Universities will say "but we've changed our courses to reflect what students didn't know before, why did you change it. We have to change again now,". And thus will continue this circle. I'm going to go and have a coffee, eat a biscuit and breathe.

I really don't want to put the blame on teachers here, I understand that they need to teach what and how they are told to teach (which, coming from a time when teachers seemed to have much more freedom to be different if not down right eccentric, I think is sad). However the way that things are required to be taught is not, apparently, giving a useful outcome. If a "good" school qualification in French does not allow you to communicate in French with some ease, when it used to do that, then there is surely something wrong, not with the teachers but with the system.

Nobody is bashing teachers, four! They do a fantastic and challenging job, and I'd double their wages tomorrow if I were in charge.

The thrust of this thread seems to me to be comparing the differing approaches (largely dictated from on high) of today and a generation ago.

A lot of that seems to be connected to the changes to GSCEs and apparent grade inflation.

The issue goes further than just how teachers are forced to teach, too. There seems to have been a wider societal shift to undermine the perceived necessity in the first place for learning a MFL.

four lets not play the 'who is most qualified' game. Plenty of us here are very well qualified.

The reality is that the current method of teaching MFL has not resulted in increased standards or interest in MFL.

That much is unarguable surely?

We are currently in a situation where a very small number of pupils in the UK have access to proper MFL provision. Most teachers and university lecturers are up in arms about this and are certainly not defending the status quo.

To be honest, the same seems to apply to written English as well ("language EVOLVES don't you know!") in the age of the internet and more and more informal communication seeping into contexts where it shouldn't oughta be. But that's a whole different thread.

It's possible the two are related though.