Anybody know how large the cohort of native speakers is for A level French?

[Naem]

I have been reading on mumsnet that a very large number of those who do MFL for A level are native speakers who then tend to take the top grades.

Does anybody have access to any statistics as to the numbers - specifically for French, which is what interests my DD.

My DD enjoys French the most of all of her GCSE subjects, and wants to take it for A level, but she is not a native speaker - she learnt what she knows in school. Barely been to France (I have been wanting to take her, but pandemics rather make it difficult). I think we took her once when she was about four years old, and once when she was about 12 for holidays.

Guess I want to understand how much of a risky choice this really is (although her heart is set on it).

Every kid who got a good grade at DD's school had French ancestry bar one whose parents sent her to French summer school for 8 weeks between GCSEs and a levels plus had a tutor. Dd got a c despite a * dropping only 4 marks total at gcse. We don't have French ancestry. I actually think the French native speaker cohort should be sitting a separate classification

None of the students taking French A Level at the school I work in are native speakers.

Thanks! @user1471519931

OP maybe I’m being naive, but why would there be a quota for top grades? Or do you mean that the standard for A grade might be set higher if there are native speakers?*

My understanding is that yes, there is a quota for the top grades. Only a certain percentage get an A, a different percentage an A etc. It is not so fixed across subjects, they apparently look at attainment at GCSE across the board to get a feel for how many "top" students do a particular subject (otherwise anybody doing FM would be very disadvantaged, as everybody doing FM is likely to be a very good mathematician), but they somehow then use these statistics to allocate a certain percentage (within a tolerance) who get an A*, A etc. on each subject (at least those where there are around 500 students a year or more).
If, say, because of the drop off in languages (both at GCSE and particularly at A level), native speakers make up a significant cohort, then the non native speakers will be facing an additional challenge, as the standards will be higher, and they won't be starting from a level playing field. Not that students do ever, but - say take the other subjects my DD wants to do - biology and maths. The number of people who learnt A level biology or maths content because their parents talked to them about it when they were a small child or lower down in school is neglible. But not quite so true for A Level MFL.

@TheresACrackInEverything - yes we are very worried that the school will not offer French. They have in the past if there were 2-3, but we don't know if there is going to even be that. The GCSE class she is one of 6, but I gather one other might be interested. We shall have to see. Some people join the school at sixth form too and they have had French takes from the new joiners in the past, apparently.

She has been sending me links to places like interhigh - and we have wondered whether she should consider taking the French online (if the school won't offer it). I haven't dared ask the school if they would be happy with her taking two A levels with them and one oneline, and don't know if online is a good idea.

The other option would be to take her other MFL for A level instead of the French (she doesn't want to carry on doing both, although she is good at both, the two of them are her strongest subjects, but she is thinking of studying more in the biology area - ie not currently thinking about languages for university- but of course that might change). There are going to be more students for the other MFL in her school (which is not one of your classics, more of a community language, although she is not a native speaker of that either - and there are quite a few native speakers in her school in that, although most of them took the GCSE early, in Year 10, the ones doing it at Year 11 are generally the non native speakers). She prefers the French though. Feels there is much more interesting accessible material in it.

It's 20+ yrs since I left school so my experience may well be out of date but I would say that it's really important to check the course content. I did A level French & German.
For GCSE, it was mainly language skills. Therefore, the native speakers had to do little but walk into the exam hall and come out a few hours later knowing they had an A in the bag.
For A level, the course was very different as it was literature and language skills. Being a native speaker gave you a massive advantage but you still needed to have read the books, understand them and write essays about them. The skills you needed were similar to those for English literature so, if your DD doesn't enjoy or struggles with that, you need to be careful what the course content for A level is. Also, whilst I'm not sure how the mark scheme wrote, you had to have some understanding of, for example, politics to be able to write a decent essay about it.
At my school, the massively dissuaded native speakers from doing a core A level in their native language as so many Universities (again, back in the day) would effectively see it as a lesser qualification.

^Sorry the second A* in this piece should be an A, otherwise it doesn't make sense

MFL teacher here and would agree with what is being said. Native speakers are definitely not normally our top grades although they often do better than their predicted grades which may be quite low in some cases. French is particularly tricky as it sounds so different to how it is written. They often have no interest in the literature side of things and may be studying other subjects which don’t really match. French is quite academic and they may be doing BTECs or more practical subjects for their other subjects and find the analysis and essay writing required quite challenging (this is not me being snobby, I know there are many different challenges required at BTEC). There is also often an arrogance as people have mentioned and a tendency to not listen in the grammar lessons. This has been my experience although this year I have a very academic native speaker who listens and applies grammar rules and is flying!

When my son was researching uni courses , we noticed that some of them wouldn't allow native speakers which was interesting

I confess I'm a language net but in 6th year at high school in Scotland I actually did an evening class at a local library...just to say that there are other routes... French institute, Goethe Institut etc...everyone does online classes now, Duolingo, watching reality the in other languages is brilliant...school isn't everything. Good luck.

*nerd

I did A level English (not in the UK), and I'd say don't let your child be disheartened by the amount of native speakers in her course. If she is passionate about languages and puts in a bit of work, she can excel! And it's now easier than ever to practice with Netflix shows in French, online French newspapers and radio. If you live near a bigger city, there'll be a French community that you can join to meet him I fuel families, celebrate important events throughout the year and extra lessons.

I'm an MFL teacher and can tell you that native speakers tend to struggle actually with A-Levels they don't prepare to the same extent as non native students, particularly for essay writing and speaking, which in theory they should be better at. So often they don't get as great grades as they could (despite extensive intervention but that's another story).

Non-native speakers should absolutely not in the slightest be put off from doing A-Level as it's perfectly possible to get highest grades without being a native speaker. As with any subject in the sixth form, hard graft and effort will get you places and MFL is no different.

Also there's no such thing as top grades reserved for native speakers or even quotas, especially in Covid times when the exam board grade boundaries appear on the face of it to be more generous.

Coming at it from the other side, we live in France and my dd, despite her native English, is not top of her class as she doesn’t want to put in the graft. Top places go to the highly motivated and diligent students.

We are surrounded by bilingual/ trilingual( and more ) people. Most have perfectly average jobs. It’s what you do after your language degree that shape for stardom. Being fluent in two languages is just beginning.

@TheAntiGardener

If your daughter wants to do it she should go for it. It’s a solid academic qualification which would get her to a good level in the language, so quite apart from top grades it’s valuable.

No idea what language A’ levels are like now, but what held me back from getting a better grade @ 20 years ago wasn’t not being a native speaker, but not being confident in speaking and being lazy in learning enough vocabulary.

Like a previous poster, I do find native speakers taking a course in French, Spanish or whatever as a foreign language a bit of a joke. Where’s the achievement?

I agree. There was a girl on my Spanish degree course who had lived in Argentina until she was 12, both her parents were native Spanish speakers. She sailed through all of the oral and translation stuff, struggled though a bit more with the literature stuff. Did her year out back in Argentina living with an aunt.

What a waste of time.

@TheAntiGardener
It not a joke for native speakers to take an A level, many of them do because their parents understand their bog standard state primary school in the UK (or any other country) is not teaching them to read and write in their native language. Or do you think your kids write and read English well just because their parents speak English at home? You may think the hours so many teachers spent teaching these skills to your kids are worthless unless you believe your kids are genetically programmed to develop literacy skills by osmosis

Interestingly, it is often the case that at university level, overseas students who learned English as a second language have a wider more advanced vocabulary and better writing skills than the average English person.

@GrandmasCat - I take the point your grammar or comprehension isn’t likely to be very good if you’ve never studied your own language and I appreciate why parents may choose it for their children if that’s all there is, but the fact remains A level modern languages are first and foremost french/Spanish/whatever as a foreign/second language courses. It’s getting your listening up to scratch, building basic vocabulary, learning completely new grammatical structures (not just learning the ‘right’ way to express something you’re already familiar with). They aren’t equivalent to A level or even gcse english - because there is a huge difference in studying a language as a first or an additional language when you’re talking about those levels.

Some courses are in fact available in native and non-native versions: there are igcses in Chinese as both a first and second language, for example. The former expects students to be operating on a completely different level to the latter because they’re starting from a different baseline.

Not sure why you would think I don’t think teachers are doing a worthwhile job. The thread is about native speakers taking A levels, not teachers.

And it doesn’t surprise me at all that uni or grad-level speakers of foreign languages often have a better grasp of English than a lot of native English speakers, although I’m not sure this is down to how they’ve studied English. People who express themselves well and gave a wide vocabulary in their own language will replicate that in other languages they speak to a high level.

My son's friend speaks four languages. His parents each speak a different languages but he was brought up in London so he also speaks English. For A levels he took another language (German I think). His exposure to lots of languages seemed to instill in him a knack for all languages. I think he also did French for GCSE so that is 5 languages in total. He has opted to do something completely different for a degree though. So I don't think it is just native speakers. It might also be people who have been exposed to lots of languages.

@TheAntiGardener. English is not my first language but although I used to speak and write my own language at a significant higher level than most people my age when I was growing up in my country (due to a combination of hyper pedantic parents with a house full of books), I confess that after 20 years later communicating in another language, I have found myself wondering how to write the word seventeen.

I am aware some universities will not accept an A level in a modern language if the student appears to be a native speaker of it, and in most cases students are discriminated on the basis of their nationality or even worse, their surname’s sound (like assuming the kid speaks German because their surname sounds “German”). But I can assure you, if a child has been growing up in the UK, their parents know that the most difficult language for the kid to acquire / maintain would be the language they only speak at home. Therefore they are not at a significant advantage to get better grades than other students unless they have attended independent bilingual schools or they try as hard as non native speakers that want a higher grade.

Encourage your daughter! As others have said, it's all about effort.

As a languages teacher, I agree about lazy native speakers taking their own language - emphasis on lazy rather than native speaker. I have known more than one French candidate who thought it would be an easy A and tried to get by on shrugs and eh, bien.

I also worked with Chinese pupils who did Chinese A level to boost their UCAS points. Some schools accept this but others don't. For these pupils, often they had lived mainly in UK since a young age so they did have to work and prepare the topics. They had not had the constant exposure to their native language that they would have if living in China. So they might be fine chatting with grandparents but not have the depth of language to use with contemporaries or in a business setting.

For anyone who's a 'native' speaker, a GCSE or A Level grade does confirm their ability and so even if it doesn't count towards UCAS points would indicate to an employer how well they speak/write/read the language.

I did A level French and German back in the day when A was the top mark. I got As in both. I had no French or German friends or relatives, and had never even been to either France or Germany or Austria.

[quote GrandmasCat]@TheAntiGardener
It not a joke for native speakers to take an A level, many of them do because their parents understand their bog standard state primary school in the UK (or any other country) is not teaching them to read and write in their native language. Or do you think your kids write and read English well just because their parents speak English at home? You may think the hours so many teachers spent teaching these skills to your kids are worthless unless you believe your kids are genetically programmed to develop literacy skills by osmosis

Interestingly, it is often the case that at university level, overseas students who learned English as a second language have a wider more advanced vocabulary and better writing skills than the average English person.[/quote]
My experience is that at degree level the native English speakers will have better written English than those who are non native speakers - I base this on reading countless covering letters to CVs.

I did French and Spanish and got an A in both. I’m not a native speaker of either language. For Spanish I got 97% - I used to try and speak to people I met on holidays and kept in touch with them by instant messenger. I also used to watch films in Spanish. I went on to study languages at uni.

My point is that there are things your daughter could do to improve her language skills and I don’t think she should worry about not being a native speaker of French.

@Dontlookdownmuch @GrandmasCat I would agree with much of this. I studied in Spain for 2 years and I took a Spanish grammar class and got a better grade than many in the class in the final exam. Some of them were really mad about it. The tutor explained it’s because we’ve really had to concentrate and study to learn Spanish grammar and spelling. In English, it’s like some people who say ‘I done my homework’ instead of ‘I did’ or ‘I have done’. Then the difference between who’s and whose etc. Many people don’t know the difference and have a habit of speaking or writing without really knowing or understanding the grammatical rules and it becomes habit.

I think it depends who the teacher is to be honest. In my year, I think 8 or 9 pupils took Spanish A-level, and we all got As or A*s. No native speakers.

A native speaker as a teacher though, and everything apart from grammar was taught in Spanish. If you met the teacher in the corridor she'd expect you to answer in Spanish and we used to have "conversation classes" as well, where you'd learn a lot of new words and phrases.