Why do ALL the pupils at my kids' school hate French??

[kitnkaboodle]

Languages were my Thing at school and I still use them in my job. I'm aghast that every single kid from the school that I talk to hates French - it's 'up' there with RE as the most unpopular. All they ever report that they've done is grammar and translation over n over. I don't know if it's the fault of the syllabus or the (two) teachers. They seem to v rarely do any listening to recordings/watching videos etc, and NEVER seem to do any speaking practice. When I asked them if they ever do stuff like doing role plays pretending they're in a restaurant or suchlike, they literally didn't understand what I meant. What's going on?? Kids in Y8 and Y10 (yes, doing it for GCSE - in the interests of doing a broad range of subjects. Partially own choice, partially on the advice of teachers.)

I'm really confused about working out the pronunciation. What words can't you work out if you know French sound-symbol correspondences? There aren't many exceptions.

Pronunciation is easy in French. And I've had actual real life French people compliment me on my accent!

re. French being 'difficult to pronounce' - I guess French has lots of its own unique vowel and consonant sounds, whereas Spanish and Italian are a bit more phonetic and with fewer different vowel sounds to English. In Italian you pronounce everything pretty much as it appears.
For example, in French, even in the simplest communication:

Comment ca va?
Ca va bien.
(sorry, no accents)

you'd have to know that the first c was hard, the second was soft. You'd have to know how to pronounce the 'e' sound in 'comment' and the dipthong in 'bien'. You'd also need to know that the 'nt' in 'comment' and the 'n' in 'bien' weren't pronounced. So you couldn't make a stab at reading it aloud, really, without learning a whole load of pronunciation rules first. Spanish and Italian not so much.
... but then again, you could try learning that exchange by listening to it and copying BEFORE you saw it written down! (tho' not in our schools, I guess ...)

But in Italian you'd have to know that the c in bruschetta was hard because of the 'h' and that the 'c' in amici was pronounced 'ch. In European Spanish you'd have to know that the c in corazon was hard and that the z was pronounced th. You wouldn't know how to pronounce ciudad or viajes any more than bien or comment. In English the hard/soft c rules are the same as French anyway (cinema/corn).

I feel that the vowel sounds are more straightforward in Spanish and Italian, tho' ....

I taught myself Spanish, it's very easy to pronounce, once you get your mouth around the sounds. The verbs and their variants are very challenging to get right.

I agree that Spanish vowels might be easier but they are still different from English ones. And I just don't think French is particularly difficult, not at the level you're supposed to pronounce it at GCSE - we're not talking a perfect accent. Anyway, I'm not sure that that can be the reason so many people don't like it. I'm completely biased as I have a languages degree and like learning languages for fun.

Freddorika - gcse mfls aren't the same thing as O levels were.

I was quite surprised when visiting France for the first time in about 30 years (yeah, I don't know how that happened either) how much came back - not necessarily all the vocab but enough to make a reasonable guess. Though every start of an attempt to speak any was subverted by the other person responding in good English.

And the phonetic thing.... All alphabetic written languages are 'phonetic' in that they all follow rules that map sounds onto letters/symbols. It's just that some sound-symbol correspondences are uncommon - in English we have some unique correspondences like 'one'. So once you know the rules in French it is very phonetically regular.

I think there's an issue with the way we teach languages in schools. Unless things have changed drastically, at secondary level at least you basically have to learn to speak, listen, read and write simultaneously. In terms of language acquisition this seems crackers to me.- too many skills to develop at the same time. Also- far too much focus on absolute precision, rather than communication, which makes kids focus on getting it 'perfect' rather than having a go. My recollection is of French and German teachers being far more pedantic about accurate grammar (and knocking off marks) than my English teachers. Again- at odds with how we naturally acquire language.

When I took a language course as an adult at university, we were absolutely concentrated on speaking and listening. The teacher basically forbade us from writing anything down. He also emphasised communication and understanding rather than accuracy, so understanding the gist of what was said (ie in a conversation that was really too sophisticated for us) and conveying the essentials of something, and not getting too hung up on grammatical mistakes.

I'm not saying of course that we shouldn't teach children to read/write MFLs with correct grammar. At some point, once a level of fluency is reached, that becomes important. I just wonder whether it's over emphasised at the early stages at the cost of developing speech/vocab and basic communication.

"I really doubt languages are that useful to the majority of people in the UK."

I think lack of language confidence is very limiting to people in the UK. Yes many foreign companies will employ people who only speak English, but you will always be at a disadvantage if you can't speak the local language.

I suspect the main reason that British children fail to progress in a second language is that they have little cultural exposure to other languages (Difficult to change - America dominates so much popular culture) and it's difficult to progress in a language if lessons aren't sustained and frequent.

I did French at GCSE and quite enjoyed it. I can remember some now and more comes back to me whenever I visit France.

DD did French from EYFS but dropped it before GCSEs and chose to do Spanish, which she started in Y7. She much prefers Spanish but isn't sure why.

Though at DD's school most girls have chosen to do Spanish, and a few are doing two with German the next popular. DD says French is now he least popular MFL for GCSE at her school and it was very noticeable around Y9 options time.

I think lack of language confidence is very limiting to people in the UK How is it limiting? What % of U.K. Jobs require French? I suspect not many.

What % of U.K. Jobs require French?

Limiting your aspirations to job requirements in the UK is very limiting.

You might not want to learn French, but there are 8 billion people in the world. If you only speak one language you can only understand people to the extent that they are willing or able to speak your language.

I've accepted that UK just don't love learning new languages. So at Options time, I try to 'sell' MFL by emphasising the skills you gain as a language learner eg. Communication, focused listening, public speaking, memory recall.
All very useful and transferable!

DS attended a French lecture after school today.

He says it was very well attended. Everyone who is doing sixth form French was there plus lots more who are not but retain an interest.

These are not terribly special kids that I can see. So obviously the desire to learn MFL is being nurtured by school.

He said the lecture was 'good' and 'useful'.

High praise indeed from a 17 year old lad.

leccybill You might have been speaking to us! I was really annoyed by the lack of enthusiasm for just the love of the languages - they were so flat. I feel the MFL dept came across as dull as shit compared to the the other subjects...couldn't help but but think, if that was the best they could do to convince kids to take GCSE I'm not surprised they are struggling to recruit.

Not me Bensyster, I'm still as passionate about languages as I was when I started learning them in 1991!

Glad to hear it. But the message my dcs received on reasons for learning French never mentioned passion or pleasure or enjoyment - it was just so bloody functionary and dull, I wondered how they convinced anyone! Despite this my dcs are both doing French GCSE - for pleasure - not for deluded career prospects....we'll continue to holiday in France to support and encourage their choices - it seems like the exchange programme has evaporated and I smverymuch of the opinion that youneed to be able to use the language to converse otherwise what is the point?!

I wish they wouldn't arse around in junior primary with French at all. By the time my boys started "proper" french learning in late year 4/5 they had already decided they hated it, and after pointless, unanchored learning of vocabulary of colours and bloody pantalons year after year I can hardly blame them.
Now in year 6 the marking is so soul destroying. He learns his vocabulary homework then is tested in sentences so gets the new words right but in a one and half line sentence loses both the available marks because he has missed one accent and got one gender wrong and so gets 51% over all. If English was marked that way it would be a see of red

And then my elder boy by year 8 had a teacher who taught wholly in French so Ds was trying to learn the future conditional in a language he couldn't understand. And the grammar sheets handed out were in French too, written to put all verbs into the conditional case. How witty! How droll!

Part of the problem is that French teachers seem to have different ways to talking to pupils. "Tu es nul" is not something an English teacher would commonly say to a child.

Most of the boys dislike French, even the native speakers , who are bored and of course, as they aren't being drilled as in the French system also lose marks left right and centre for accents etc

My own experience of two dc going through secondary is that there is a lot of peer pressure involved: you should dislike languages and find them useless and difficult, whereas it's much more accepted to like geography or English literature.

I found this bizarre, as both my children are fully bilingual, but they still bought into this attitude of "other languages are horrible", completely without thinking. [grrrr]

When I grew up in northern Europe, it was the opposite: languages were our key to travel and adventure; they were cool; they were exciting. It was far more socially accepted to say you disliked maths or PE (which obviously wasn't a brilliant attitude either).

And yet I struggle to see what our teachers did to make them that exciting. We had no access to native speakers, no television or youtube (obviously), most of our teachers had very little experience of speaking the language themselves, and a lot of the lessons were taken up by reciting the principal parts of the verbs.

Cory, how much time was spent each week on languages?

Interesting thought about attitude. My dc's comp seems to have a positive buzz around languages - everyone does 1 in year 7, 2 in year 8 (French + a choice between a 'very mainstream' language and a 'slightly way out' one), and 2-3 more languages are offered up to GCSE level in after-school / lunchtime clubs.

The vast majority do at least 1 language to GCSE, though I think they are split fairly evenly between the 3 Year 8 languages rather than being mostly French. A good number (my best guess would be c. 30ish) do 2 language GCSEs as part of their core teaching time. A few more will do either a second or a third outside the main school day.

However, we live in a town where there is an obvious 'language heavy' employer (not necessarily for the 'core school languages', but one that highly values the ability to learn languages) so perhaps that influences both parental and child attitudes?