French in year 7 and 8

[Amber]

In 1996 I studied Spanish GCSE at night school. One night a week for two years I think. Was shocked by the ease of the exam paper and passed with an A grade. You could have scored points on that paper not knowing a word of Spanish !

Dumbed down certainly !

That was 1996: you would get an A* now!
It makes me laugh that even a Russian GCSE paper, with the supposed barrier of another alphabet, could be attempted by my then 8 year old, who managed 6 out of 8 on the first section - road signs.
The most recent Spanish one I saw had a photo of an attractive young lady on the 'phone. A speech bubble revealed the word 'Hola!' but with upside down Spanish exclamation marks. Question one: what is Carmella saying?


To be fair, there are more difficult bits, but it is a far cry from the unseen translations of our youth.

[ourmaminhavana]

I think the teaching and requirements have varied a lot over the years. I too recall daily lessons to drum the verbs into us!
I remember a teaching friend some years ago saying that they learnt phrases now and it was more an 'at the point of need' approach. I queried what they did if they needed to deviate from the set phrase eg change the person, tense etc. and this wouldclearly have posed a problem.
However, a decade or so later and my son, now in Year 8, uses Tricolore 2 and is expected to know how to conjugate verbs in a number of tenses with a similarly rigorous approach to the one that I encountered as a student many moons ago. He's only been doing it since Year 7 (unlike many of the prep school children in his class), but is making excellent progress. Perhaps, as a result of the Spanish he learnt when we lived in Central America.

[Alice in Underland]

I read an article in The Guardian last year about how there was a desperate shortage of English Graduates with fluency in at least one modern foreign language, needed to work for the British Government in Brussells.

[twinkles]

My son does French and is currently in year 8. He is doing really well at it and had no experience of the language before starting secondary. He has already exceeded his KS3 target 6B (his school do KS3 in two years rather than 3) but the way French is taught today bears no resemblance to how I was taught it years ago.

He brought one of his tests home the other week and it was full of mistakes, verb endings wrong, spelling mistakes etc but the teacher had written something like excellent work on it!

Last week we had his options evening and we spoke to his French teacher and he explained how the exam works and were told that (I can't remember which way round it was, I think it was this way) 40% is oral and listening and 60% is done by 'tests' throughout the course and your best two or three or sent away to be marked????? Sounds a lot easier than in my day.

I did both French and German at O Level and found German much much easier.

[pheasantchick]

Thank you for posting hs thread. I suddenly realised tht all of Ds French vocab test consisted of words, rather than verbs and tenses. I think the old method would suit him more, as it's more logical.

Am I the only one on here who has a CSE in French ( failed my o-level ) and wasn't deemed clever enough to do two languages.

[um]

My son's French school syllabus/teaching certainly isn't dumbed down. I'm surprised at how advanced it was!
I have an A* French GCSE (you can tell my young age ) and I have struggled to help him with his Year 7 work.

Then again, its complete lack of any application and use (ditto with my German GCSE) and having 5 children in the intervening years has probably wiped out a good part of my memory...

As for which languages we should learn, I wouldn't put Spanish down. The South American countries are becoming increasingly politically and economically important...my cousin is going to live in Brazil and their economy is booming right now. If I were to choose two others of importance it would be Mandarin (Chinese) and, of course, Arabic.

The problem is, we tend to have school teachers trained to teach French and German, not Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic, and, rather than be visionary or strategic, it seems schools find it easier to keep the status quo.

Edit: Forgot to mention Russian too

[la boume]

They speak Portuguese in Brazil, and a specific one....

[um]

Thank you la Boume...

However I understand that the languages are very similar and have been told that if you can read either Portugese/Spanish and pick up a book in the other language, you can understand almost all that is written.
My cousin is able to manage both easily despite having only 'studied' Spanish.

I wonder if it is similar to speaking Arabic in Yemen and Egypt? Two different dialects to get used to, but essentially the same core vocab?

[Amber]

Your cousin is very talented um. I can speak Spanish but it helped me not one jot in Portugal. Though reading is more of a possibility than speaking or understanding the spoken language, I grant you. And the Portugese spoken in Brazil is not the same, accent wise, either. A knowledge of Spanish does help in Italy though, I have found. And Russian helps with Czech, Polish and Bulgarian, just as having one of the Scandinavian languages helps with the others. German is a great way into Russian - the grammar helps.

French...helps with France.

[bondgirl]

My degree was in French and German many moons ago, so I am probably biased, but I am always woefully embarrassed when abroad watching other Brits use the "talk pidgin English slowly and loudly" technique to make themselves understood ,

I read an interview with Professor Brian Cox recently who was saying that he hated studying languages at school and gave up French as soon as he could. Fast forward many years and there he was posted to Cern in Geneva, unable to order himself steak and chips in a restaurant

And for the record, I always preferred German too!