French speaking advice?

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I am trapped in hell with perfectionist ds practising for his French speaking GCSE which will be just after the holiday. Any advice would be wonderful as I know nothing and he is going mad over it. He is practising the answers he did in the mocks when he got a 9 but speaking was the lowest element. He says he was told to make it more spontaneous as that was what cost him the most marks but he is apparently struggling with this. He is also saying all the phrasing sounds wrong even though his teacher has obviously seen and heard it and says the content is fine, as far as I know and he is saying.

I know no one can help really but what can I tell him? How important is spontaneity? His accent sounds good to me - I don't speak French but he's definitely 'doing' an accent if that makes sense? I know the grade boundary to get a 9 is quite high, presumably due to native speakers doing it so perhaps he should forget about a 9? I would - the pressure is all coming from himself...Any advice about any element for this would be amazing.

Get him to watch some French tv or a film. Subtitles in French ideally. Dix pourcent is funny. Netflix will have some French stuff. He’ll relax a bit (which is possibly the biggest issue here?) and hearing the intonation will help his speaking.

Thank you - that's great advice and we have watched a lot of French crime drama which definitely helped with listening but I think made him more critical of his own accent! Finding something funny to watch would definitely help at this point though.

French TV is great, but he also needs speaking practice, conversation with a friend or relative that speaks French? (Not even good French, just a case of practising what he knows).

But... fluent, confident speech is really hard, something I still hadn't mastered at the end of a four year degree. And I did get the top grade for GCSE (nearly twenty years ago).

I doubt he needs native fluency, just to try his best and gain some confidence.

Good luck xx

Hi OP I am an MFL specialist. Firstly I honestly don't think the percentage of native speakers in French GCSE in the UK is going to have any effect on your ds's grade. A level German, maybe. GCSE Polish, yes. But lots of students still take GCSE French so a 9 is certainly achievable.

Here is how the speaking test is marked (out of 60):
Role play - 15 marks, 10 for communication, 5 for knowledge of language
Photo card - 15 marks, all for communication
General speaking - 30 marks; 10 for communication, 10 for range of language, 5 for pronunciation, 5 for spontaneity.

So you can see spontaneity is a small percentage of the total mark. Marks are deducted here if the marker thinks the candidate is relying heavily on pre-learned answers - this might take this mark to 3/5. I don't think this is big issue tbh (unless he is scoring 1 here); content (ie communication) is a lot more important. Is he developing answers - as in, saying more than just a single sentence. What hobbies do you have? I like playing football every day. - fine. Better: I like playing football every day in the park with my friends. Last week we had such fun even though it was pouring with rain. When I leave school I would love to become a professional footballer - much better.

Also v v important to develop answers on the photocard - you can only gain the top bracket of 13-15 if you extend your answer to "most" questions - 3-4 of the 5.

But agree, any French he can listen to from a native speaker will also help his pronunciation. Tho native fluency is neither sought nor expected.

If you want any more detail please shout

Thank you so much for that, Clary. I did think spontaneity must be more to do with not just sounding like you're reading an autocue so that's reassuring. Helpfully, he can't remember the breakdown of marks he got for the mocks but did say he knows he did better on the role play and photocard than general speaking. He says his answers are detailed so...I know his teacher at parents' evening says he tends to over-complicate things and tries to say things exactly like he would in English so don't know if that brought him down, though he obviously didn't do badly anyway.

We'll definitely watch some more stuff as well.

Over complicating thing + saying things exactly like you would in English sounds like he’s trying to add in more but doesn’t have the grammar or vocab knowledge yet to do it well so he’s using English syntax.

There's a YouTube channel called Damon & Jo that does funny, informal french lessons. Some of the videos might help him. In particular the ones about adding in French "filler" words to help sound more authentic while playing for time thinking of the actual content of what he wants to say!

Tbh it's pretty hard to advise without hearing or reading what his answers are like! Translating what you want to say too literally from English into the foreign language is a common problem though, both with less able students and with diligent, perfectionist students. That could be what's taking down his spontaneity mark, but potentially causing him some grammatical issues too.

Yeh tries to say things exactly like he would in English is when someone thinks what they want to say and doesn't know it in French so tries to translate word for word... better to say what you know even if it is not exactly what you want to do when you grow up!

How about singing along to some french songs? I am an esl teacher in France and I often suggest singing along to my students, great for rhythm, intonation, contractions and lexical chunks. It doesn't matter if he understands, there will be phrases he recognises, word repetition etc.. and hopefully it will give you a break from practised answers

Some french artists my kids like are Soprano, M.Pakora, Black M, Big Flo and Oli, Angele and Louanne. Probably others this is just off the top of my head, but he can find songs on youtube (avec paroles) depending on his taste and sing along.