Language classes and bilingual pupils

[Chouchoubidou]

DD starts year 7 next September. She will have to choose between French and German. I'm French and I brought her up speaking French, so she's completely fluent. Hubby is Brazilian, and she's also fluent in Portuguese. None of us speaks any German.
We'd like her to do French and Portuguese GCSEs, as she'll definitely get good grades. Even if she's fluent in both, she'll still need to work hard on learning how to write. She's not keen on learning German.
As she already speaks 2 foreign languages, we think it's OK for her not start a 3rd one, one we can't even help her with at home.
That's why we would like her to do French at school instead of German. The time she'd spend studying it can be spent improving her litteracy in French and Portuguese.
I've once heard that some schools refuse to let bilingual children pick a language they already speak. I don't know where her new school stands on this matter, and I'm keen on maybe just choosing French for her, say nothing and see what happens.

What's your experience with secondary schools' policies on languages for bilingual pupils?

This is my experience (language teacher for many years). Often children who are fluent in a language that either is or isn't taught at the school will take a GCSE in that language in Year 10 so as to avoid adding to their exam load in Year 11. If it's a language that is taught at the school, sometimes these students will not attend lessons in that language (because they are fluent and don't need to) and will do a GCSE in it, but choose to study one of the other languages on offer at school. Or some students will go to lessons in the language they are fluent in. It varies a bit from school to school.

I think you need to consider the likelihood that she will find KS3 French, aimed at total novices and with minimal writing for the first couple of years, utterly stultifying.

I can't see she'll get anything out of it. If it's just a case of getting another GCSE, she could probably pass without spending a few years being bored senseless (and creating a weird dynamic for the class).

My children are also trilingual; two languages are Romance languages. I’m very keen for them to learn a non-Romance language in a classroom setting so that they learn how to learn a language. I notice that they aren’t leaning things that their peers are because the language they learn at school is the one we speak at home. Learning the mechanics of a language is a very different task to picking it up naturally.

Also, the bilingual kids at my school just took the GSCE exams without doing the lessons. Is that still a thing?

She will be bored in French in y7. It will be a waste of time. Most bilingual kids prepare to do their gcse in year 9. She would be better off taking German in y7.

How is she going to get anything out of spending an hour learning her numbers 1 to 20 for example?

I'd take German, just for the fun of it! It's obvs not going to matter how well she does in it as she has two other languages to fall back on.

@clary would probably have some thoughts. Even though your DC is fluent, it's not a walk in the park for GCSE as there are some very specific things you need to do to gain marks. She would need to do some work, but probably not a huge amount, to ensure she follows the right way to answer questions in the right manner to get top marks for GCSEs.

I agree with others – if she is genuinely bilingual, she will be utterly bored learning KS3 French. I also think learning German – a different language from french and Portuguese and learned in school in a very different way from how she has learned other languages – sounds like a more productive process.

I taught MFL in school for years and since you ask, here is my experience of “bilingual” students:
Student 1: German mother, kids in the class say “miss, he’s German” (we were learning German). Uninterested unmotivated student who barely wrote a word of German in a year of teaching him; was easily able to do any speaking work though. Did not take German GCSE. Obviously not bilingual never mind German!
Student 2: Flagged up on entry to school as having French parent and grandparents; said to understand and speak French well. French was the only MFL we were offering to his year so no choice to take German. In fact tho he understood French pretty well, he could barely speak it and not read it at all. He was a good student but not in any way outstanding.

So neither of these DC were actually bilingual – as I am sure your DD is @Chouchoubidou – but I offer these experiences to show that schools may be sceptical and at least may want to do some kind of assessment of her language skills.

But yy I suggest she does German in school and takes French GCSE, with a few lessons to grasp the exam technique and yes, make sure she answers questions as needed (the extension and narration needed is a bit artificial for a native speaker) maybe in year 10.

Haha @TrainGame exactly :)

My DC are bilingual - French. They were both bored in the lessons even though they needed to work on their writing skills and grammar rules. The school didn't have the staff to support them having work set for their ability. They had extra lessons outside of school. School allowed them both to do their GCSE early so when they had their GCSE options, French had already been sat and they were free to do another subject as a langage isn't compulsory at their school. DD is about to sit her A'level French and has found that the grammar side of things has challenged her properly and has had to properly study. The spoken side has been easy for her.

Depending on whether or not a language at school is compulsory at GCSE, your DD has nothing to lose by doing German as she potentially would have the option to do no languages in school for GCSE.

Bear in mind there is some element of literature/culture to mfl gcse so she would need some skills beyond the language itself. Agree French will soon bore her, but school may allow her to sit it early.

It will be an absolute waste of her time doing beginners' French.

Also, she's 11. She might love German and be really good at it. Who are you to take that opportunity away from her?

DD is about to sit her A'level French and has found that the grammar side of things has challenged her properly and has had to properly study. The spoken side has been easy for her.

Ah this is interesting @Okki – ppl often post that native speakers taking A level MFL have it easy – and obviously some elements are easier for sure, but I always maintain (based on my own experience of working with native speakers) that there will still be a good deal of work so thanks for backing that up :)

What do you anticipate her doing in french lessons ? I think it might be hard on her spending half a term learning to say bonjour, je m'appelle, j'ai douze ans, for example.

Yes @Chouchoubidou just to give a flavour – we used to work on producing a mini Q&A in the first term so that by December students could answer about a dozen simple questions – Comment tu t'appelles, que fais-tu pendant ton temps libre, quelle est ta matière préférée, où habites-tu? that kind of thing. We focused mainly on speaking in the first term (though of course the students wrote it down as well) – I presume your DD is more than capable of that, including writing it down. How bored she would be working at such a level!

I teach languages in secondary and am so unimpressed by parents who choose the ‘easy’ option for their DC. We always have parents who do this complaining that the Year 7 classes are too easy for their DC (no surprise Sherlock - they are for beginners in those languages!) and want extra special
provision for their precious kids.
Would be so much more beneficial for those DC to start another language from scratch, but sadly too many parents want to game it.

Apart from having to conform to what the examiners want from you (and take care that your understanding of home language isn't just colloquial or regional) it is mind-numbing to be in a class learning the language from the ground up. A least I got to know what it was like being a teaching assistant.

OP, it wasn't exactly your question, but some universities do NOT accept A levels in the family language. Something you might want to look into

It is not always that obvious though. One of dd's friends took Russian and IR despite being from Belarussian descent and spending summers there with family. Another took mfl at Cambridge with a French parent.

Personally I would want my child to study the new language and take the one they are fluent in as an additional GCSE. So she’d learn German at school from Y7-Y11 and sit the GCSE having learnt the same amount as the other children. Most schools allow the children to sit a GCSE in their first language too, so in your DD’s case she would sit both the German and French GCSEs, although this is something you’d have to discuss with the school.

It's also worth noting that children who are already bilingual or multilingual are better at picking up additional languages because their brains are already wired differently (i.e. not to consider English as the default).

So even though French and Portuguese are both romance languages, simply being multilingual will probably make it easier for your DD to learn another language, even if German is very different. She could potentially get a top mark in her German GCSE and take French and Portuguese as extras. (Although she would probably need some tutoring in both to make sure she can read and write them correctly, and not just speak them.)

My DC did A level in their second language. It was very useful for tidying up their written grammar and stretching exposure to vocab that we don't use every day. They also took GCSE but didn't have a choice. It was boring but freed up time for my less academic child to concentrate on other subjects.

As I sat for my final exams (a long time ago) our French class became mixed ability at the end (don't know why - teacher absences?)

One poor girl was wondering why "I went" in English had three parts in French "je suis allé".

If I was rolling my eyes, as a mediocre second language learner, imagine how frustrating that will be for your fluent DC. And what a waste of time

(I know it wasn't that girl's fault but we were literally on a count down to final exams so my tolerance for questions like that was zero)

Anther aspect to consider, if you don't speak English at home, is that your DD's English might need more time and attention as she gets older and further through the school system. This was the case for one of my DC and I wouldn't have introduced another language for that reason. Not all bilingual kids are inherently good at languages.

I don't understand why children cannot take the option of improving the language they are learning. A lot still have room for improvement since they do not have as much exposure to the language as the main language they use at school etc. I see at schools they want you to take additional languages, but I don't see the benefit of learning 4-5 languages not at a good level. I would think it is far more beneficial to offer more advanced classes to bilingual or trilingual children so they can advance in the language they are already learning. Of course fine if one is only bilingual and they take up a third (in addition to advancing their second language), but I think it is silly to take two new languages starting from scratch.