The language barrier
Mrs B has received an offer from a local French teacher-friend, suggesting they help each other improve their language skills. Sounds good and sensible, except…the friend already talks very good English and has emphasised that the finer points of grammar are to be the area of focus.
Now Mrs B, like me (myself?) can speak and write perfectly well, if not perfectly, but the UK education system in the 1970s and 1980s hardly focussed on English grammar. So neither of us know a preposition from a participle. And conjugation is what comes naturally, as are sentences starting with ‘and’.
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, I thought it might be interesting to show you the timetable for a 13 year old ‘quatrieme’ student, to see the different priorities that France gives to subjects compared with other countries.
The school week is 9-5 on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and 9-12 Saturday. The long days are compensated for by long school holidays. The weekly breakdown is:
Maths 3.5 hours
French 4 hours
Spanish 3 hours
Latin 3 hours
English 3 hours
Techno (computing) 1.5 hours
History / Geography 3 hours
Science 1.5 hours
Art 1 hour
Music 1 hour
Sport 3 hours
French consists very largely of grammar, several hours a week throughout school life. This also means that French school children can grasp other foreign languages better. It also explains why Mrs B has a problem.
There is much more priority given to other languages than you might expect, and little to history and geography and the other ‘peripheral’ subjects. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? No idea. France has more or less the same economic success rate as other western countries, so perhaps good basic language and maths skills are really the only important lessons that are needed from school.
At first I was concerned how low a priority science seems to have, but that’s because I have a science background myself. Almost all the science I ever learned is now lost in dusty recesses of my head, never to be seen or heard from again (including all the contents of my Biology degree, and every bit of chemistry I ever learned). I would give more focus to computing, but that is just because I am a geeky type of chap.
We do have a mission (well Mrs B has a mission) to help the children with their homework. Apart from language problems (e.g. understanding a history book written in French), I think I had forgotten how hard school children actually work. ‘Can you help me with this Latin, Dad?’ or any question starting with ‘what is Spanish for…?’ send a terrible fear into my heart, and I pretend I’m too busy. ‘Ask your mother’, I mutter from behind my keyboard, ‘I’m much too busy’.
I thought I was pretty good at physics but the question ‘what does a diode have in common with a motor?’ had the three of us on Wikipedia until the early hours. I can knock up a pretty decent website before breakfast but the coronation dates of the French Kings is a mystery to me.
And this is when they are 10 and 13 years old. How will we manage in two years time, or in five years? I can’t begin to wonder. I’d best get studying.
We moved to France four years ago and our two girls are now 16 (just starting three years study for her Bac) and 10 (in the last class of junior school).
I found the ‘mummification process in Ancient Egypt’ extremely difficult to help with in French two years ago, and am now dealing with electrical circuits in Physics!
Our eldest daughter is still in contact with her best friend from England and comparing their school timetables:
England – studying for 4 a’levels (including French): 8 hours of classes in total each week. Set topics
only are introduced for ‘conversation’ in class so finds actually talking to people when she visits us, impossible.
France – studying for an MPI (Maths, Physics and IT) BAC (still includes French, German and English languages as well): 34.5 hours of classes a week, monday to saturday.
In these last four years, both our daughters have received a thorough grounding in the rules of grammar, and have both found it far easier learning subsequent languages because of this. Even in the earliest class (age six) the children immediately learn French plus a second language, with equal emphasise on grammar and contemporary spoken conversation (rather than stilted theoretically correct sentences).
Unfortunately our youngest is officially a ‘chatterbox’ in three languages because even though she only learns two languages at school, her best friend speaks Spanish fluently as well – so with her group of best friends, she has spent playtime learning Spanish as well! Our eldest is convinced that because their brains had to cope with learning French by being thrown in at the deep end – their brains are ‘open’ to learning other languages as easily. She also finds that the rules of grammar of one language, are directly transferrable to another – therefore making it easier.
We hear a lot in the English news about not testing children too much because it puts too much pressure on them. Here however the children are ‘tested’ regularly each week on all they have covered so far in their different subjects. The children are so used to this that they take it in their stride, and find that the regular revision does make it stick in the mind!
I recognise that the structured teaching methods (some call them old fashioned) that are standard here, would not suit every child. However I am thankful because our two girls are thriving here – they love school, work hard because they do not see it as ‘work’ and are comfortable switching between 2 or 3 languages without thinking! It wasn’t such a bad move…..!
PS sorry this is such an essay!
Thanks Jacqui, glad to hear your own experiences are like ours – not surprising I suppose, since the French education system is in principle the same across France.Our 13 year old has just started Spanish (as well as doing French, Latin and English) and loves it. I think you are right, that with a couple of languages already spoken naturally, another one comes much more easily. We have to pass dinner each evening with her speaking Spanish now, not easy.
It is a constant amazement to us how few people from the UK who profess to speak French can actually speak French to a French person, which certainly suggests some kind of problem with the education system.
As an aside, at lunchtime today we went to a restaurant where some English were discussing (loudly) whether the French for beef was pronounced ‘boof’ – but that’s tomorrow’s blog so I shouldn’t mention it…
Thanks again for taking the time to comment on your experiences.