I'm experimenting in teaching French to DD

[didgeridooda]

DD is in Yr 7. I'm having a go at teaching her French very informally - saying the odd sentence in French, doing occasional CDs in the car (Pimsleur), occasionally watching a French children's DVD or reading a French toddler book with her. She has also started to do a bit of DuoLingo online. She is quite keen on French now.
After a few months of this, she understands a lot of French.
My older DC has been learning French in private and grammar school for 6 years, and is in top set.
The 2 DC found an online French test. Younger DD got a higher score. Her pronunciation is also better.
I'm sold on this informal method now. And what on earth are the modern language teachers doing? Older DC can still say and understand practically nothing. Why have the schools (those I know) got rid of language labs, for instance? Unless my DD is a great linguistic talent, it's not that hard.

i missed the first two years of French due to being in a different schooling system. My dad bought me loads of children's books and tapes in French and it was amazing how quickly I over took my classmates.
It also gave me a real love of the language and a confidence that comes from learning it organically.

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

I really resent being somehow to blame for the fact that our government does not prioritise the learning of languages.
I do my best with classes of 35 once a week. I'm not sure I can change the world with the little time I have!

sendsummer - people may well travel or than they did but that really isn't (tragically) any guarantee of cultural understanding. Other EU countries are explicit about the fact that two or mor MFL must be taught to all pupils in order to foster European feeling. Not so in the UK.

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

Fighting against a tide of

• but everyone speaks English, Miss

-but it's hard -but I'll never go to France -but my mum said to focus on my English and Maths

what on earth are the modern language teachers doing?

Working bloody hard to teach mfl! But when there is not enough lesson time, when you have to teach to the exam (which encourages learning set pieces off by heart), when many pupils see mfl as a difficult and unimportant subject and when pupils are so ignorant of how their own language works that it makes it much harder to learn a new one, we are pretty pushed tbh.

Mfl really is a school subject which is different from the others. If we as a nation want to actually get good at it and teach it well to our children, we need to prioritise it and make proper and suitable space for it in the curriculum (and teach our kids English grammar sensibly from early primary age). I don't think that as a nation we actually are sufficiently interested in doing so though.

I took French at A level in 1970. We were extremely well taught. Not having spoken the language for 20 years we stayed in Province and it all came back to me. and I was neither the sharpest knife in the box nor was I a good student

Your experience with your DC seems to make sense. I passed GCSE French in 1990 and it was all topic based, memorising phrases. When I arrived in France a few years later to live for 6 months I realised I couldn't formulate a sentence. It was frustrating. I needed the building blocks of grammar. I learnt to communicate in the end and have good pronunciation but still make heaps of grammar mistakes with conjugation- I think I'll try teaching my DD one to one as you have.

Really interesting thread. My DCs are only yr5 and yr3 so not experienced this with them yet but I do remember being horrified at how little my DSCs were learning when they were at secondary.

My two are home educated now and we are doing Spanish and (due to being anime fans) Japanese. Setting up monthly tuition sessions in both to keep us going but will mostly be self studying.

I once contacted the head of MFL to ask why my Y7 DC had come home with page after page in exercise book showing French verbs incorrectly conjugated, je chante, tu chante, il chante, nous chante, vous chante, ils chante etc. I was told that not conjugating at the beginning "made it easier to learn". Same school gave lengthy lists of nouns to learn with no articles to show masc/fem. Zut alors!

It's an interesting thread. I don't think I've learned anything new but it's comforting to know that other parents, as well as MFL teachers, are frustrated by state-led prevention of proper access to MFL teaching in schools. A scandal.

If the money could be made available there should be more specialist language teachers shared between primary schools teaching MFLs with the same approach to grammar as in French schools. Unfortunately not all MFL teachers seem to be good at this since IME pupils from many private junior schools taught French or whatever from a young age still seem pretty rubbish at it in secondary and beyond

Again, sendsummer, it is unfair to blame teachers for failing to impart proper teaching of French grammar in primary schools. There are very few quality materials available for teaching MFL to English primary aged DC and so teachers have to improvise.

The sort of training necessary for effective MFL teaching to primary aged DC is also incredibly hard to access. Most decent teachers work from a position of personal experience.

The teaching to the exam was ridiculous.

I couldn't believe it when my very well motivated dd came home and said that what happened was the teacher gave them the list of questions, they answered it, took it in and had it checked and then memorised it and regurgitated it for the exam. As I pointed out, having a fairly good memory, I could probably do an exam in any language (with our alphabet) in a couple of months with google translate.

I believe they're stopping this, with makes sense because it certainly didn't teach to speak a language.

Mine do languages at junior school, and really I'm not convinced of the merit. they have teachers from the local secondary in to teach it, but all they ever do is nouns and a few others. They never learn how to form a sentence. They learn to count, do the alphabet, colours then after that just do a lot of noun topics where they learn various animals and things like that. As that's basically vocabulary, I slightly wonder what the point is.

With primary, part of the problem is that most schools don't have a trained mfl teacher, but also I think it's often seen as a bit of an 'extra' and doesn't get much teaching time. I teach mfl once a week at my village primary. The children get half an hour once a week and that's it. Plus it's Spanish and they won't all necessarily start with Spanish at secondary school.

A lack of joined-up thinking between secondaries and their feeder primaries is part of the problem. It's all very well making mfl compulsory at primary, but even if you had a proper teacher and a decent amount of lesson time, it's no good if you have half the kids starting from scratch in year 7 because they learned a different language at primary.

In secondary there's also the issue of which languages you offer and at what age (if at all) a second mfl is added. At dd's school they start both French and Spanish in yr7, which is insane imo. The level of confusion between the two languages is horrendous in all but the most talented. They sometimes have French and Spanish on the same day, occasionally with the same teacher! In yr 8 many are still answering the register in the wrong language.

It's all very well suggesting properly-trained, nay, native-speaker MFL teachers, but just where are they going to come from? Maybe they could be bribed into the system somewhat in certain areas (although it's still difficult to recruit Maths and Science teachers, no matter how large the golden hello) but where are your MFL teachers in, say, Great Yarmouth?

I live in South East and MFL teachers are as rare as hens' teeth. Sil was MFL teacher and she pissed the school about no end (another story altogether) but she had them over a barrel because they simply couldn't find anyone else. In fact the school has now ceased to offer a MFL, due in part to lack of interest as well as difficulty in recruiting suitably qualified teachers.

Another point is fashions in languages. When I was at school and we had to choose a 2nd language it was all German! German! German! Europe/the City/business yada yada... I wish I had done Latin but the message was "dead language" . A few years later it was all Japanese! Everyone was scurrying along to after-work Japanese classes. Then it was Mandarin! All the little Huberts were learning this. Then it was back to Latin! And now... I think everyone's given up.

People who are properly qualified to teach MFL are discouraged from doing so by the insane syllabi, Rhoda. The heart and soul of any school is its curriculum, which needs to be properly supported with high quality teaching materials. Only then can decent teachers be both motivated and successful.

The new style GCSE is very different (and much harder). There's no coursework so no memorising a passage.
There's a 'describing a picture/photo' element and lots of written translation.

It's much better but will be the death knell for MFL at GCSE and it is very hand so future cohorts will run a mile from it.

Oh I know, Rhoda. Properly qualified mfl teachers are what's needed, but I have no idea where we'd get them from!

I remember the thread in Staff Room (I clicked because of the title) where the OP was a teacher with NO Spanish knowledge whatsoever was being made to teach it in her primary class

It's not just England that foreign language teaching is no good.
In my native country, everybody learns English in junior high and high school. That's 6 years. Most of them cannot speak English at all after all those years.
Learn just to pass the exam won't work.

leccybill - I don't think the new GCSE spec is harder! It's logical, constructive and makes sense. That is easier than dumbed down to mumbo jumbo, which was the previous situation.

When will children start taking the new GCSE?

Irvine - which country are you from?

Bobochic I was n't attributing blame just stating a view from my experience. I did wonder if part of the problem is that younger MFL teachers who were taught by new GCSE style have not themselves experienced the systematic teaching of grammar to children making it harder for them to apply it. I am sure some of the PPs who are MFL teachers could put me right on that.

I am guessing that MFL teachers are getting rarer because the message is filtering through to graduates that MFLs are being reduced and are low priority particularly at A level in state schools.