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

Thanks Bof and chemenger. I think it's sometimes hard not to take things personally - stupid over an impersonal forum really. Perhaps it's because I bite my youngest too much when 'real life' people put their oar in... But there's another thread.

"TheWordFactory" yes.... But I am actually qualified to pontificate on this point surely... Much as you might be able to pontificate on say.... Immunology?! No idea, but it comes with a reasonable wage so feel free to run with it :)

The standards/interest in MFL has altered little, unarguable. Same of most other subjects though... Overall population academic aptitude has not changed either though. Also, according to what 'they' (ofsted/the government/mother of the bogeyman) are looking for actually most students have got proper access to MFL which brings me back to my previous comment about his being the way we teach, which I'm not saying is not limited and I'm not saying is the only way. What they don't have is what some posters remember through rose tinted hindsight vision...

Rafals - MFL teachers DO teach grammar, and much of the markscheme when marking the written element of the GCSE is based on grammar - they have to be able to use the tenses at the very least to convey their meaning. However, the way the 'exams' work allows them to learn chunks of a pre-planned essay off by heart to regurgitate in controlled conditions, with the use of a dictionary! Plus, the writing is only one part - once you mix that in with the listening, reading and speaking exams, it's quite possible to get a C without a good grasp of the grammar.

We do teach grammar, I promise! But there is not the time to give the necessary grounding (in English to start with! ).

Teaching grammar is my forte. I love doing it, and have had many pupils over the years thank me when they've had those 'lightbulb moments! . But in the vast majority of schools, with the majority of classes we are fighting a losing battle.

four how can you say interest in MFL hasn't changed when numbers studying at UG level were at the lowest point in a decade in 2013/14?

And of those who did take it further, the numbers that were educated in the state sector fell even further?

The thing is the emphasis on A Level grades has made many pupils, and I would include ds among those, shy away from MFL for fear of not getting a top grade. I think this is driving huge numbers of kids towards Biology etc which have a much higher hit rate of A*s/As.

Ds was also put off by the numbers of pupils of French extraction taking A Level French. He felt he was on a hiding to nothing. I'm sure it's not the case everywhere but there seem to be an awful lot of kids locally with a French mother - much entente cordiale 17 or so years ago!

I think the numbers studying has more to do with what schools offer as alternatives now than anything else. Firstly it was made optional in most schools and then the schools offered other 'more interesting' choices. Kids like the idea of media studies (because they wrongly things it's all about watching films), anything ending in 'ology' (because they think it sounds grown up) and child care (because they think it's all sand pits and play dough). In schools that stuck to the traditional 'academic' choices there has been little change in the numbers from when MFL became optional to now. Certainly in my current and previous schools teachers say the class sizes show little difference from 2006. Where it differs is that my previous school had approx 15% of a cohort in MFL (because of the range if options) whereas my current school has about 40% (because if the comparatively low number of choices). Academically the schools are close - they just play the numbers game differently.

That makes sense.

When lecturers at the best universities, such as Kalidasa on this thread, say they have to assume a starting point of 'zero grammar knowledge' for some languages taken up at degree level I think this shows that we've lost our way? Surely that's just absurd?

To my mind it points to a ridiculous dumbing down but perhaps it is just a change of style? We could all cope with simple novels in French at A'level in the 80s but that style of teaching has fallen out of fashion. It's ok to now guess at the grammar as we have the internet for that sort of knowledge etc. Instruction in the old fashioned formal sense is out of fashion and the child led/pick it all up by osmosis method has been in vogue for the last couple of decades. I think there are signs that the pendulum is swinging back now. Surely if you have the grammar/structure down pat first the rest comes much more easily?

Do A Level MFL students still do literature as part of their course?

I wonder how many British 18 year olds could cope (ie get a useful grade such as 7.0) with the foreign-language equivalent of IELTS? We can set a gold standard for other people's mastery of our language - why does that not translate into our own standards of MFL?

No Leeds2, they don't
Not according to the AQA board.

HTF are they going to manage when they start their degree?

I am so getting ds and dd a Nouveau Bescherelle and a Bon Usage when I am next in France.
Luckily dd is being taught French five lessons a week immersion-style and she has improved MASSIVELY in half a term. Ds is on course for a good iGCSE grade and taking the subject at Higher IB level next year, also thanks to a French native speaker.
My children are fortunate in that they are both at academically selective state schools with language specialisms. Even so, provision has wobbled a little in ds' case.

Literature is somewhat falling out of favour in MFL teaching. The CEFR puts much more emphasis on modern usage in current RL situations than on literary analysis.

In t'olden days I can't say my A Level literature was up to much. We had to do three German novels, but answer the questions in English. In lessons you spent hours painstakingly writing out the English above the German (dictated by the teacher) and that was that. A glimpse at a German newspaper or magazine might have been a worthwhile addition to the course...

That's fair enough, I chose my own degree many years ago on the basis of its strong language component and Y2 DEUG study in a French university for my year abroad.
I still think that some level of interaction with literary French should exist in the A level syllabus, even if as a translation exercise.
I can't pretend I enjoyed reading Le Notaire du Havre or Le Noeud de Viperes

Sartre and Camus featured heavily during my studies at university. They were of no use whatsoever. And these days I live in France and am so bilingual as to be rather a lot better at writing French than my (highly educated) DP...

I can see the argument for ditching much of the literary content of A Level, even though it's something I personally like very much. Learning a MFL should equip you to read whatever you choose to/is useful and appropriate to your interests, but there's no real reason why it necessarily follows that you should demonstrate literary analysis skills. I am often impressed by the fluency that non-native speakers display in English, but I wouldn't expect for a moment that they should have to display an in-depth knowledge of the works of, say, George Orwell in order to be considered proficient in our language. It's a different matter if they just love his novels and want to read them.

On the other hand, it's possible to be too utilitarian about these things, and it seems a shame to completely junk all exposure to some fascinating figures of French literary culture.

I have been reading this debate with interest. My own experience of O level French was that you could spend five years learning solid wodges of grammar and be able to pass an exam but no more. Not be able to hold a conversation, or ask for directions, not really be able to read anything. And no, we didn't learn the subjunctive - although I suspect that this was more to do with my school not getting through all the syllabus.

But then the pendulum swung too far the other way and grammar went completely out of fashion, resulting in young people babbling on in 'pidgin' French, so getting by, but being very limited.

Having learnt Spanish as an adult, classes now seem to have a good balance between the two, with the emphasis on reading, writing, speaking. (Although personally I would like to see more emphasis on listening and understanding.)

I suppose that studying the literature may not directly help you read or write modern French, but that isn't the point of putting it on a course.

Literature can help you access the people and their culture, but then so can film, music, food etc.

I guess A level cannot give over too much time to this ( and in the past perhaps too much was) but a little? To put all that grammar in context .

I think that part of the problem may be that different approaches suit different people.

Personally, I can't get my head round the spoken-no-grammar-no-written-language way of learning at all. I spent a lot of my time when I was studying Welsh through the intensive Wlpan course asking the teacher to write things down for me so I could remember them, things I hear and don't see just won't stick. But it's meant to be an amazingly successful course in general, and plenty of people swear by it.

(I also have absolutely no ear for music - I've wondered in the past if the two things are related.)

You sound like you are more of a visual learner, Tak. If you google learning styles quizzes, it might confirm it for you.

News papers and Le Petit Nicolas are all you need to put French grammar in context for a very long time!

IMVHO Babar (the original ones by Jean de Brunhoff), Le Petit Nicolas, Astérix and Martine tell you most of what you need to know about French culture. Relationship to authority, innovation, institutions, bourgeois aspirations and base realities all covered .

"Ds was also put off by the numbers of pupils of French extraction taking A Level French."

DD was the only one in her A level class who didn't speak French more or less natively, as well as the only one who didn't spend every holiday there. She worked like stink and got a B - and has discovered a love for languages and is doing Russian for her "pick anything you like" module at uni. Thank goodness she didn't need the A/A* she was predicted for the French, because every single one from her school went to a child who was genuinely bilingual.

I would love to feel able to encourage DS, currently in year 11, to take an A level MFL. I really can't. Instead I'm sat here listening to him memorise chunks of text for his "oral exam" tomorrow. He's not learning French - he's doing the equivalent of a singer learning lyrics in a language they don't speak, because he gets more marks for memorised fancy constructions than for being able to hold a basic conversation (which he can do pretty darn well, actually). It makes me really cross. He used to love languages.

On another line entirely, someone said that people use primary school terms for grammar. If someone asked me what a verb was I'd probably say it was a doing word too, though I have A level French (oldstyle, with grammar) and O level Latin. I actually don't know how else you'd describe it

A verb is a word that does an action, shows a state of being or helps another verb!! There you go Skylark, a definition of a verb from our US English grammar course.

Because a verb does not always involve action - I am (but I'm not doing anything). I can play tennis (can is a verb to but it is helping 'play', which is an action verb). Actually I can't play tennis but I wish I could!

Thread has moved on somewhat but just to respond -

I didn't post my entire yr 7 term 1 lesson plan but I promise you that I don't just teach them J'aime le foot. Yes, as fourcornered says, in the same series of lessons I teach them a dozen other sports and also how to say I don't like, I love, I deteste; I ask them the question (tu); in due course we talk about their brother or sister (il/elle) and so on.

Of course we don't just learn a load of phrases parrot fashion. If you could see me jump up and down with delight (sometimes literally) when a year 7 student manipulates the language and moves from je ne joue pas to Je ne fais pas you would see what I mean. but that's a high-achieving student and I also need to cater for students coming to me with a L3 in English.