11 Plus Exams Forum

Could anyone recommend me an online course for Year 6 French? We need to home educate just for Year 6 and have found a great core package, but French is not included. The apps/websites I've heard of are all aimed at KS1. I can't be trusted to try and teach DD French on my own - I am hopeless! Any recommendations very gratefully received.

Have you looked on Twinkl? They do good lesson packs usually.

I haven't, and thank you for the suggestion. Will check it out...

I’m not here to recommend French resources for Y6, but if you’re planning to study a language at home without access to someone who can make the right sounds and put the right words in the right order, please pick a course that includes audio - ideally spoken in a native accent - from the beginning. If the eventual aim is a decent working grasp of a language [and obviously that takes years…], the order of priority should be listen, speak, read, write. Workbooks alone are only useful if someone in the house knows how to say the words, otherwise you’d be better off not bothering. The person tasked with teaching French at our primary routinely mispronounced basic words. I had to unpick it all a year later, because a bad foundation is far worse than none.

The listen, speak, read, write approach works in English too and applies at every level, including 11+ and far beyond; just keep increasing the complexity and formality of what you listen to / the programmes you watch.

Bearing in mind Stroller’s advice to get the input of native French speakers may I suggest there are good free language learning apps available for laptop or smartphone eg duolingo but there are many others you could try. These include listening and speaking and complement a structured, academic process. They can be used when there is a spare ten minutes so don’t feel burdensome.

Speaking as someone whose written French is way better than spoken, I will add that even without fluency in the spoken language there is a very real advantage to being able to read in another language (not to mention the cultural and cognitive enrichment).

PerpetualStudent wrote: Speaking as someone whose written French is way better than spoken, I will add that even without fluency in the spoken language there is a very real advantage to being able to read in another language (not to mention the cultural and cognitive enrichment).

I fully agree btw and I love languages - I can read quite a lot in quite a few, at a standard high enough to spot errors made by native speakers in more than one. However, my spoken French would be much better if I had had today’s access to native audio (spoken slowly at first, but not mangled!) when I was starting off. Trying to steer others on a better path.

Do you have Netflix/Amazon Prime or similar?
There are several really good films with subtitles English/French and vice versa.

(Monty Python had improved my French swearing no end!)

yoyo123 wrote: (Monty Python had improved my French swearing no end!)

Might be a bit of a shock to the French teacher of an incoming year 7, however .

Wow, thanks so much, everyone. Yes, we have a bit of a dodgy foundation/unpicking situation to deal with here! (Don't ask...a well-meaning but hopeless attempt at MFLs by previous primary school) Love the French films idea! Thanks, everyone. Much obliged.