AQA Gcse French speaking, higher level

[LlamasUnited]

Im hoping someone can advise, ideally a French teacher or knowledgeable parent (thanks in advance !) My daughter has her AQA french speaking exam next week. Her teacher seems to be saying (and she could well have misreported this) that they need to basically rote learn answers of about a minute each for every question in every module. There are 8 modules and about 10 questions in each. So 80, minute long answers. The answers they apparently want are quite complicated. I have seen some examples. Surely this can’t be right? It seems to be demanding a very high level of French, far beyond anything we did for gcse. I vaguely remember just having to ask someone for directions and buy a skirt or something. I’m hoping she’s got it wrong and she only needs to prepare maybe 2 or 3 modules. I’m a bit concerned to be fair.

Yep sounds right- my daughter has Spanish speaking next week also. She has been sitting in her room and I can hear her rabbiting away in Spanish. She has a large stack of revision cards with her answers on which she is memorising

They are not really supposed to learn answers off by heart. In fact the exam boards are critical of schools whose students sound too rehearsed. But in reality there is nothing to stop them from learning answers off by heart as long as they manage to sound spontaneous. So that's what most of them do!

Unless the student is very able and has quite a decent level of fluency (very unusual by GCSE), answers learned off by heart with great vocab and complex grammar (which most woild be incapable of producing spontaneously) will get them much better marks, as long as they've got a good memory and prepare very well. It's crap really- it's a memory test, not a language test.

They get to put foreward a nominated topic for general conversation which is one theme- two or three modules. So for that section of the exam it's only two or three modules of answers learned by wrote.
However for the other sections of the exam any of he other modules could come up so all need to be revised.

DS is doing his in a week or so as well, hope this helps.

French teacher here

She choses a theme
1 - family, friends, free time, festivals
2 home town, holidays, (global issues - seriously doubt she'd get general conversation qs on it as teachers avoid as we know it is hard)
3 jobs school future plans

Ideally she need to have ready a 1 minute or so paragraph on one of the topics of her chosen theme which includes 3 tenses, opinions, reasons and any complex language she can use. The teacher will start with this then ask questions related to what she has said - so if she says Last year I went to France but this summer I am going to Spain - the teacher might ask 'do you prefer France or Spain?' (I do this to get them to use a comparative i.e. France is more interesting than Spain). After a maximum of 3.5 minutes the teacher will announce a change of theme. Then she will be asked an opener question on one of the other topics i.e. What is your favourite school subject - which I would expect a student to answer ' I like maths because it is useful' ideally she would develop her answer by telling me about her maths teacher and what subjects she doesn't like etc. If she doesn't I'd ask prompting questions like 'and do you like English'.

I know my students so will ask questions that play to their strengths - the girl who is obsessed with Gary Barlow I will try to steer the conversation to music. The boy who wants to be a pilot I'd ask about holidays, job plans and if he like geography etc.

Hope this helps

Thanks so much all, that’s really really helpful and kind of you. So it’s not just learning one paragraph on one of the topics, presumably any could come up do they’d have to learn 80(!) Which seems impossible. She’s doing a word document which has answers to quite a lot of them, but they are no way long or detailed enough, and she just doesn’t remember them. My French is reasonable so I can help her over the weekend, but it just seems overwhelming. I had no idea.

Things are definitely a lot harder for young people these days. In no way are GCSEs getting easier. I feel for them all.

Just focus on a decent paragraph for her chosen theme and being able to say a sentence or two for everything else.

Trying to learn 80 paragraphs will just stress her out and is not possible

really appreciated, thanks, so can she chose any question she wants from the chosen theme?

it’s stressful as hell, and she’s got an auto immune condition which is massively exacerbated by stress which is making it all the more worrying

My son's had his oral today. His is Edexcel iGCSE so he learnt the photo plus the 4 or 5 related questions.

For the 80 or so questions, we've practised them over a month but there was no hope he'd learn them all. He wrote in English roughly what he'd talk about for each one. Then try to overlap between themes.

School advises the kids to try to learn some advanced structures that can be put in any sentence. Along the lines of if I'd had the choice, I would have ...or I've always dreamed of doing this etc. Plus trying to use different tenses where possible.

Our challenge was not saying um every third word...

MFL specialist here.

pps are pretty much right, the best way to do well is to learn answers in the themes. Yes AQA say they don’t want pre-learned but v few students are likely to be fluent enough to avoid this.

She chooses as @uxo says one of the three themes, and should have already sorted with her teacher which sub themes to cover. Theme 2 is best and ask for qus on holidays and your home - this avoids the dreaded environment and social issues.

Of the other two themes, one is the photo card, which you have no control over (except that it won’t be on your “chosen” theme) - so if you choose 2, the photo will be school or family (better than poverty or recycling).

You get 12 mins to prep the role play plus the first 3 photo questions, then get 2 unknown photo questions which the teacher cannot change.

The order is role play, photo, chosen theme then the third theme not already covered. 3.5 mins on each general theme. So she does need answers on all three themes, but obv will not use them all.

For a tip top mark a student needs to develop all their phoyocard answers and also all theme ones. For a really strong student I would hope to ask a max of four questions on each theme but of course I ask as many as needed to take up the time.

Remind her she has to ask the examiner a question too!

To answer your other questions, on his chosen theme it was:

• the photo
• a detail about the photo (what are they wearing or eating)
• what happened before or after (you can slightly fudge this if you put one of them in the photo description)
• why you chose the photo/theme
• one question from the sub-topic chosen at random

@dig135 hope your dd did ok. Edexcel IGCSE is fairly different from AQA GCSE (student picks the photo for a start!) tho the themes are similar.

@LlamasUnited I agree with uxo, she should learn her first answer well. She should check with her teacher which question she plans to start with.

I assess good number of private candidates and try to work with them as far as I can.

Just to say, if you are doing AQA GCSE this is very much not the same. Apart from the first qu being what’s in the photo - but GCSE students only see the photo 12 mins before the test.

Crikey, that sounds hard!

Sorry @dig135 ds not dd! Stupid phone

Well it’s not easy, but for the Edexcel IGCSE I would expect a very high quality of answer for the photo questions, as they more or less know what they will be.

The toughest element for AQA is often the two unseen photo questions as a weaker candidate will often be thrown by them.

thanks Clary, so can the teacher tell them which question they will ask first? That would make a big difference. I assumed it was random.

I teach MFL & tend to give students 10 possible questions per topic. There are 12 topics.

Any less and they are going to all say the same thing as each other.

AQA is different to Edexcel. There is no presentation.

This is why less students want to take MFL. The content is difficult. It's not just family for example, they need to discuss marriage, relationships for example. When I first started teaching they talked about pets and hobbies and booked train tickets etc. Now it's homelessness, social issues, problems with internet etc... so much harder.

I mean they are not really supposed to but I am sure all teachers in schools (not me any more) do so.

You lose marks for spontaneity but that’s not the end of the world.

Ah right thanks, I’m not sure my daughter’s teacher will.

Thanks very much to everyone who took the time to answer, very much appreciated.

@converseandjeans yes in my day it was all booking train tickets and other easy stuff. This content is crazy. Cheers

Sorry to keep posting!

A useful thing is for her to have some stock phrases to give herself thinking time:

A mon avis…
Je pense que
Je crois que
Selon moi
C’est tres interessant, et je…
En ce qui me concerne, je …

They basically all mean hmmm well I think…