Blimey : MFL A levels have changed

[Piggywaspushed]

Disclaimer : went to school in Scotland in the late Middle Ages.

I studied French and German as CSYS level (kind of like A2) and got As so considered myself good. But what my DS is doing now is really turning him off. we did three lit texts in French and German (this may have been more than we needed knowing my school!) and some history (German was east Germany and education , I remember; French I think was the resistance) But all our teaching was basically in English, certainly all our discussion of texts and I SWEAR we wrote essays in English!

DS can't even seem to learn grammar in peace now without it being related to some 'ishoo' and even his homework is set in detailed Spanish.

I know this is all very worthy - but it's no wonder kids talk about the gulf between GCSE and A level in MFL!

DS already dropped French after one week. He can't drop Spanish, not least because he got near as dammit full marks at GCSE. You wouldn't know it, though. He is really struggling, hates it and is now being supervised in free periods to force him to work... there is no shame emoji so I went for blushing...

The teaching isn't great either, which does not help. Boys definitely respond negatively to weaker teaching much more than girls ime.

Anyone else share my his suffering?

to be clear, I haven't' told him that because he is a boy blah blah! I keep that to myself!

Yes but they probably don't read Dickens at Abitur. They probably read shorter, more modern stuff and write about it in English

I’m not as young as I feel too & did Phedre, Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard, Therese Desqueyroux & another book - can’t remember what it was. We did O level in Year 10 and then A/O in Year 11 so had the preparation of reading L’Etranger before starting A level. All the literary essays were in English. Dd has just started French Pre-U & is really enjoying it - she’s had to write two 1000 word essays so far, one on marriage & the other one on something environmental. She is going to study one book, one play and one film.

I did French A level in the 90s. Like a previous poster, we had to write essays in French about various topics (social issues, the Maastricht treaty , terrorism, anorexia in teenagers, environmental issues, that sort of thing). But for literature we studied the text in French, learnt key quotations etc but wrote the essays in English. It was crazy though, because literature made up something like 30% of the overall mark, which seemed ridiculous as it had so little to do with actually learning to communicate in the language. I would have really struggled to write the literature essays in French.

We studied Therese Desqueyroux too. I can still remember having to quote something about her crushing her cigarette butt firmly underfoot, even though she was in a city, something about her being from the country and being afraid of starting a fire...

I left school in 1999 with an A* in French. I took A Level French and always regretted not dropping it and switching to something else.
I found the GCSE so easy but the switch to A Level was incredibly difficult. All our work and lessons were in French and I distinctly remember doing a module on agriculture in which we had to talk in depth about different soils. I ended up skipping lessons and came out with a C (A grades in other A Levels).
I wouldn’t advise anyone to take a MFL at A Level unless they are already near fluent in the language.

I wrote long lit essays in the TL in German and French A levels in 1990. Didn't feel like a big deal. DD found it a big step up to A level, and found the discursive as opposed to spoon feeding style hard, but she has now got used to it, and is doing well. The GCSEs were far too easy to be a good prep for A level though.

It is hard to get good quality teachers though. I spend a lot of time correcting grammatical/spelling errors in DD's teachers' worksheets, and that's just with my ancient A level standard knowledge. I have checked, and it's not that my knowledge is out of date, the mistakes are genuine. It does concern me a bit.

Memory Lane! We did:
French: La Malade Imaginaire; Maupassant Short Stories - all good. Then Le Grand Meaulnes - never got what that was about; Le Noeud de Viperes: can't remember the author and found it pretty boring. But one image has always stayed with me. The narrator one night overhears his family plotting and scheming outside under his window at night. In the morning he sees the swirls that their chairs have left on the gravel and compares them to the trail that snakes leave. Bloody genius!
German: OMG - Die Neue ... Jungen W! Quite enjoyed that as it was very Catcher in the Rye but it was quite tedious the way that it kept referencing ...??? Goethe??? ... I don't think our teacher had a clue. I can remember a long passage about who is and isnt an 'echter jeanstrager'. Cant do umlaut! Also some awful dreary book set in a shipyard with an awful dreary shipyard cover. Any ideas?? Can't remember any other German texts. German was a bit of a scandal because we were all expected As and got Bs - even my mate who went to Oxford! Thanks for nostalgia trip!

My god daughter dropped German this time last year but still doing Spanish. She had found she didn’t have the confidence in the German class of all bilingual speakers. It has been so sad to watch as she truly believed being in an immersion environment would be really helpful but her confidence could not handle the gulf. Her A* in German didn’t prepare her enough. Her problem is her future plans and A level motivations involved languages and now she is doing Spanish as a filler whilst deciding what to do in university next year.

Piggy I don't think you are right about German students discussing English texts in German. My kids are at international school in Germany and it offers the IB. Normally the IB students would do "Studies in Language and Literature" in their mother tongue and "Language Aquisition" in a different language BUT to make it the same as the Arbitur the native-German speakers have been told they'll need to swap that round and do the more advance language course in English not German.

However you're not wrong about the jump between ALevel and GCSE.

Lots of people who did French and German! I can’t imagine with the death of MFL in schools that that’s common any more. Kids at my school only take one language to GCSE.
I did L’Etranger (dear god Meursault was a prick and the teacher kept banging on about existentialism), Un Sac de Billes (quite good) and La Symphonie Pastorale (old man seduces blind young girl, she regains her sight, sees he is disgusting and commits suicide).
In German I did Andorra (forgettable), Death in Venice (ugly old man stalks beautiful young boy then dies) and Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (a parody of the rise of Hitler and bloody brilliant).
I reckon if we’d had to write essays in the target language, my German/French would have been better. It’s all practice isn’t it?

I can't cope with the emphasis on bloody ishoos these days. I recently did a GCSE in (yet another) language and I had to learn reams of vocab on drug use and recycling. And the listening is always something like, "Four young people are discussing how they recycle..." As if!! Dd is currently learning masses of phrases about climate change. What happened to "Can you direct me to the town hall?" !

I did A Level German - with no teacher. Well, the teacher went on long-term sick leave and we had to struggle through on our own, including trying to read the set texts. I can't imagine this happening today, or if it did parents would storm the school. I don't think my parents even knew.

Anyway, engraved on my heart is trying to read Der Verlorene Ehre der Katharine Blum and Kleider Machen Leute. I had to go through line by line with a dictionary. Unsurprisingly my A Level grade was awful.

I did A level French in the mid-90s (should have done German as I was better at it!).

I definitely remember having to write essays in French and we did Bonjour Tristesse and Therese Desqueroux. The latter enriched my vocabulary and there are so many French words I remember solely due to that book!

It was a massive jump from GCSE - I'm a natural introvert and found the requirement to discuss, with near fluency, complex social issues, paralysing.

Therese Desqueroux is free on kindle in French, if anyone’s interested

Like the OP, I also did French CSYS in Scotland in the Middle Ages.

It was a bit of a farce as the teacher was not a strong French speaker (extremely dodgy accent) and very unenthusiastic (with hindsight, probably depressed).

Luckily I spent a lot of time in France (mainly looking after small children) and taught myself a lot by reading Marie Claire, reading modern French novels, watching films and tuning into a very crackly France Inter. We wrote our Lit papers in English, we did La Guerre de Troyes...and maybe some Maupassant. I can’t remember. I had to study a region of France and ended up writing and essay on food and drink in Alsace in English complete with made up references to nonexistent books I hadn’t read..’Alsace my Way’

Anyway I got away with it and got an A. I’m sure I couldn’t get an A now at A level (even though my French is better) as sounds much more rigorous.

Certainly looking at my dcs the A level students work way harder than CSYS students in the 80s.

None of my dcs so far seem interested in MFL, they are put off by the rote learning of GCSE. They can see that it doesn’t really help them to communicate properly in a real situation. Duolingo is more practical, it even has ‘bots’ to talk to now.

This thread is a good insight into what’s required for A level though.

Wow this is a trip down old memory lane isn't it!?

re the ishoos : yup, when our DCs go abroad they will be able to converse with fellow youths about recycling and the breakdown of modern marriage in a catholic society. And I did agriculture too in East German history! And converse about Therese Raquin .

I am sure these are all excellent conversation openers!

My DS was a dual linguist at A Level for all of a week. This thread ajso been engaging - but am filled with alarm for DS who will have to pull his finger out...not his default...

Yes indeed. I could probably have a half decent conversation with a French person about drugs, AIDS (it was the 90s when I did my A levels ) and airline terrorism. But when I went there on holidays I struggled horribly with things like trying to buy paracetamol when I fell ill, and deciphering the local taxes on holiday accommodation.

Basically, only bother doing MFL if already fluent?

Oh.

DD (yr 11) was pondering doing French A-level. None of the rest of us are capable of more than ordering a coffee. Apart from DuoLingo, is there anything she could do to bridge the gap and make it a more realistic prospect? She is currently ploughing through Harry Potter in French by way of bedtime reading, but although her owl-wand-and-cloak vocabulary is improving, her political and drug-taking one is probably a long way behind.

I am not opposed to the writing in the TL if well taught. it seems way too early ofr my poor DS to be attempting it though, I think, in the way his teacher expects anyway.

In my degree we translated Buddenbrooks into vernacular English from German with a German German dictionary (which was tough but we had a dictionary!) in an exam and wrote an essay which was in English : definitely is as I still have it!! There was obviously a lot of depth in that as a consequence.

I did Latin at A-level. Quite a bit of agriculture in that but possibly less recycling and drug taking (though you have to wonder about parts of Ovid's Metamorphoses).

Took A level French in the 60s. Everything written in French. Also much conversation as well as grammar. I was not a good pupil but, all these years later I still speak French quite well. Just back from holiday there - spoke hardly any English at all.

Yes but they probably don't read Dickens at Abitur

my english abitur exam 6 hour long. main part was writing an essay on the great gatsby...
in addition we were given some short texts to analyse and compare tge use of adverbs.

dickens would have been easier

A bit off topic but dd has started state secondary and was looking forward to learning French. They have two native French speakers in her class and she says the teacher spends the entire lesson talking to them