How hard is it to get an A or A* at A-Level in a MFL if not a native speaker

[LondonHOPDad]

Hello

I was wondering how hard it is to get a top grade at A-Level if they are not a native speaker in a MFL (Spanish or French in particular).

Just that really, does the number of native speakers push the grade boundaries up, or is it negligible really and I am worrying about nothing?

Thank you.

I agree with @clary and @Jaffapaffa .The trouble is that MFL A Levels are just really hard, regardless of the native speaker issue. The step up from GCSE in terms of the level and accuracy of language expected is pretty brutal, especially for German imo because of its grammatical difficulties.

This 100%, often native speakers get complacent and overconfident and don't reach the top grades because they don't put in the work. Of course hard work on it's own is no guarantee either without some linguistic flair but an A* is totally within reach for a non-native speaker.

I just wanted to add that the grade boundary thing can be a bit of a red herring - when writing and setting exams, it's almost impossible to make them the same level of difficulty every time. So if one year the 'same mark' in a German paper would get you a higher grade than in a French paper, it's most likely because the French paper that year turned out to be a bit too easy. If you have large enough numbers taking the exam it's most likely the exam board can make those adjustments based on typical proportions of students getting top grades, i.e. if everyone's getting 80%+ it's probably not because they're all capable of an A. As fewer students do German these days, it's plausible that the cohort is self-selectively the ones who are better at it, so you might expect more genuinely high scores. Basically I think DC should just do whatever language(s) they like best and are best at, and not assume they won't get the grades they deserve.

For sure it is true that is must be hard to set a language paper of an equivalent standard in German as in French. That's basically what AQA told me when I queried this a few years ago.

However I should point out that the disparity has been the case for years - I went back to 2019 but it was true in previous years and has been true every year since (and yes I know about covid).

Also the thing about Germanists being better bc fewer doesn;t make sense - if that were the case the boundaries would be higher surely, not lower?

It annoys me bc really half the paper (AQA this is) is the language exam element - for the speaking and writing exams it's not about how hard the exam is as the speaking is based on the student's own IRP so it's as hard or easy as they want to make it - and the writing is also self-selecting in that you can write a simple essay (bc let's face it the questions don't vary that much) with low-level language or a much more complex one with higher-level language - that would be down to the student not the exam IYSWIM. That's half the marks are NOT about how easy or hard the paper is.

@clary fair enough, I haven't studied the papers! What I mean about the students being better (because weaker ones dropped it) is that if there is a small cohort and a high proportion do well, it's more plausible to think it's because the students are clever rather than because the paper is too easy. So you would leave the grade boundaries where they were rather than raising them.

One of the problems with the perception of the difficulty of getting an A/A at A level, though, is people look at it and think they don't dare risk taking a MFL A level if their preferred uni course is likely to be 3 As. People are just too terrified of taking the risk of not getting a good enough grade. Ironically, as we know, if you actually want to do MFL at uni, the unis mostly take into account the problems of getting a very high grade at A level and offer slightly lower grades for language degrees. DS's highest offer for MFL was AAB and Warwick offered BBB.

Oooh, fallen foul of the MN * highlighting!

Well it was quite a while ago but i got an a in a level French and def not native. Not even that particularly strong but worked bloody hard at it.

I read an interesting paper about this. A major problem is where you draw the line, as there is a continuum through from the child who has lived and been educated there with native parents until recently, to the child with one French parent who has picked up enough to converse with grandparents. Some are only fluent verbally.

If you look at the figures, there are far more A* for languages than other subjects - presumably because the bar is set to be achievable for non-native speakers. There's also quite a bit of content - novel, film, learning about culture, etc, which means that the native speakers have to work. They also have to work harder at the grammar than you might expect, and (in French) the endings, since being fluent orally doesn't mean you know exactly which ending is written.

If DD doesn't get A* it will be because it's her fourth subject and so lowest priority. She's spent 10 days in France, and parents have rusty O-levels, so negligible help there.

MFL has become very unpopular at A level, making the impact of native speakers (1st or second gen) larger, making MFL less popular, and so on.

focusing on french alone there were about 800 A* passes in 2023 (see http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev.htm)

the ONS reckoned that there are currently 189,000 French born people living in the UK (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_migration_to_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=Population%20and%20distribution,-A%20map%20showing&text=The%20Office%20for%20National%20Statistics,France%20was%20recorded%20as%20155%2C322.). if the ages of these people were evenly split between 0 and 80 that'd mean about 2,000 French born 18 year olds... but of course the 189,000 are likely disproportionately distributed between early working through I suppose early retirement ages... and some of them may have immigrated here early and/nor not taught very much French to their children and/or not had children who'd reached the age of 18... some will have married Brits, some other french people, some no-one at all... if I had to guess how many 18 year olds there were in the UK who had one or more parents for whom French was their mother tongue and/or was speaking a bit of French at home then I'd probably guess the number to be... what... it's difficult to avoid the suspicion that the number might well be higher than 800, ie the number of A* passes?

I guess also worth bearing in mind the size of other UK immigrant communities which may have some French.

Belgian 30k
Canadian 75k
Swiss over 20k
DRC over 20k
Ivorians c 10k...

in aggregate we're talking the equivalent of one our major cities' worth of first gen immigrants.

Yeah- you can see how that would happen as the native vs non-native speakers would be hugely skewed to native, plus Chinese students typically have an insane work ethic so you're doubly screwed. It's not like they'd just turn up and try to blag it.

Remember that the native speakers’ advantage is greatest in the speaking exam, which only accounts for 30% of the A level. In my experience native speakers who have learnt in bilingual homes have much less advantage in the literature and written components unless they have had explicit instruction in the target language for many years. Culturally this is more likely in some languages than others, for example those who have attended Arabic or Polish Saturday school.

Particularly in London, a significant proportion of those francophones will attend one of the lycées français and take the Bac as a native speaker rather than A levels.

I got an A in German at GCSE in the mid 90s, scored 100% in the oral exam. I'm still very proud of that achievement! Not a native speaker.

Granted this was 20 years ago now but I got As in both my MFL a levels as a non-native speaker.

They have to be hard, because native speakers were easily getting A* etc and "devaluing" the awards.

The Chinese exams for example, are now much harder than ever. There's set texts/books they have to read and comprehend to answer questions about etc. if you haven't read the texts, you don't stand a chance.

I did French a level in 2000 (so many years ago) and got an A. I didn't find it hard at all. But I did study and learn vocab. It's not a difficult subject to do. You just need a good memory.

In Welsh, there are two qualifications at GCSE: Welsh (Cymraeg) and Welsh as a second language (Cymraeg Ail Iaith). I suppose the small numbers sitting MFL qualifications as native speakers would make this prohibitive cost-wise though.

My cousin got an A* in French last summer. She is not a native speaker. However, she is extremely clever and hard working. She also loves watching French films which definitely helped.

That was decades ago... A levels are much harder now than then.

I got a A at Geography A-level in 2001, having not even completed my coursework, and didn't answer all questions in the exam... No way would I get that now.

Ds got an A in German a level last year as did 3 others in an average state school class of 9. He is not native, no one in immediate family speaks the language and he did one week language school in Germany between Yr 12 and 13. He has a very good memory so didn't struggle with vocab, but I wouldn't say worked harder than average.

My daughter did in French, although I am half French and her Grandmother is French and loves there so she's spent a lot of holidays in France, but she has never spoken it at home, so not a native speaker as such.

I got an A in German, I enjoyed it at school and it was never an effort to spend time at it. I had a class mate who grew up to 11 in Germany, spoke German at home with her German parents, she got a C…her writing was poor, she used to zone out in classes and tell everyone it was boring.

some will be like that, sure, but also plenty like me neighbour two parents in early middle age, one french background, the other not, their kids took GCSEs and A levels, one of them, at a French speaking private school, got ACC, not a hugely hard working or ACC academic child, no prizes for guessing which subject the A was in.

sorry the asterisks went bold instead. the grades were A-star, C, C, the A-star in French.