French as a School Subject
Jun. 6th, 2004 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageOkay, somebody (I really haven't got everyone's handles sorted out yet - sorry!) said they wanted to hear this, so here it is: my opinion of the problem with elementary French in Ontario.
We start in grade 4 teaching French. For the first two years, it's basic vocabulary related to family, school objects, food, etc. This vocabulary is taught with very little real-life context, usually as lists of nouns attached to pictures you colour, with the occasional dialogue. Verbs are taught as grammatical concepts or in their least useful form, the infinitive, in the vocabulary list. There are lots of games which involve memorizing simple phrases or bits of grammar, again out of context. None of these vocabulary words is presented often enough or consistently enough to ensure acquisition (which, for you non-linguist types, means learning a word well enough to use it at a later date.) Most evaluation centres around either simple recognition or spelling, which is also taught outside the context of a phonetic framework for French.
Fast-forward to middle school. Kids by grade 7 have had three solid years of vocabulary which they never acquired, grammar which makes no sense to them because they don't know the English equivalent (or no equivalent exists) and a series of marks for which they feel no pride because, as far as they can see, they haven't learned anything. All of a sudden, the grammar is stepped up at least two notches, the reading switches from repeating after the teacher to read-and-summarize activities, and they're faced with being asked to actually converse in French. By this time, of course, the special ed kids are well defined and very, very resistant to learning anything involving reading (after all, they have things read to them or dumbed down for them in English - why not in French?) and the kids whose frustrations turn into behaviour problems are spending, on average, two periods out of six at the office each day. Throw into this mix the complete lack of continuity in their French program (different teacher each year, stressing different things) and is it any wonder middle school French is a teacher's worst nightmare?
We need to change our whole approach to French. You can't simply present vocabulary the way you do in Science or History and expect the kids to be able to use it on the test. In English, kids need at least five, and often ten exposures to a new concept to acquire it; in French, you can count on doubling that. We also tend to assume that kids are going to realize that the word you say and the word they see are in fact the same word; the fact is, there's no reason why we should assume that, since the phonetics of French are quite different from those of English. My method involves several key changes of procedure, outlined as follows:
1) Teach every noun already connected to two verbs that often go with it, using the first-person singular (je) and third-person singular (il) forms because they're the most common and the easiest, e.g. "met le chapeau, met le pantalon, enleve le chapeau, enleve le pantalon, porte le chapeau," etc.
2) Connect a hand sign to every word - a visual and kinesthetic link, not to mention one which show's who's bored by showing up who's not participating
3) Tell stories, then get the kids acting them out in plays - they should hear the story with the same words but different visuals at least five times before being asked to repeat much of it;
4) Walk them through reading sound-by-sound, point out sounds they know, and above all TEACH PHONICS
5) make them speak in full sentences when they answer you, and try to get them formulating the full sentences as soon as possible ( I had my grade 4's answering written questions in full sentences by February.)
Btw, I can't take credit for most of this. A teacher named Wendy Maxwell came up with most of it. This is just my personal summary.
This is it. This is what I want to do with the next few years of my professional life. Think there are any principals out there who care enough to let me try?
We start in grade 4 teaching French. For the first two years, it's basic vocabulary related to family, school objects, food, etc. This vocabulary is taught with very little real-life context, usually as lists of nouns attached to pictures you colour, with the occasional dialogue. Verbs are taught as grammatical concepts or in their least useful form, the infinitive, in the vocabulary list. There are lots of games which involve memorizing simple phrases or bits of grammar, again out of context. None of these vocabulary words is presented often enough or consistently enough to ensure acquisition (which, for you non-linguist types, means learning a word well enough to use it at a later date.) Most evaluation centres around either simple recognition or spelling, which is also taught outside the context of a phonetic framework for French.
Fast-forward to middle school. Kids by grade 7 have had three solid years of vocabulary which they never acquired, grammar which makes no sense to them because they don't know the English equivalent (or no equivalent exists) and a series of marks for which they feel no pride because, as far as they can see, they haven't learned anything. All of a sudden, the grammar is stepped up at least two notches, the reading switches from repeating after the teacher to read-and-summarize activities, and they're faced with being asked to actually converse in French. By this time, of course, the special ed kids are well defined and very, very resistant to learning anything involving reading (after all, they have things read to them or dumbed down for them in English - why not in French?) and the kids whose frustrations turn into behaviour problems are spending, on average, two periods out of six at the office each day. Throw into this mix the complete lack of continuity in their French program (different teacher each year, stressing different things) and is it any wonder middle school French is a teacher's worst nightmare?
We need to change our whole approach to French. You can't simply present vocabulary the way you do in Science or History and expect the kids to be able to use it on the test. In English, kids need at least five, and often ten exposures to a new concept to acquire it; in French, you can count on doubling that. We also tend to assume that kids are going to realize that the word you say and the word they see are in fact the same word; the fact is, there's no reason why we should assume that, since the phonetics of French are quite different from those of English. My method involves several key changes of procedure, outlined as follows:
1) Teach every noun already connected to two verbs that often go with it, using the first-person singular (je) and third-person singular (il) forms because they're the most common and the easiest, e.g. "met le chapeau, met le pantalon, enleve le chapeau, enleve le pantalon, porte le chapeau," etc.
2) Connect a hand sign to every word - a visual and kinesthetic link, not to mention one which show's who's bored by showing up who's not participating
3) Tell stories, then get the kids acting them out in plays - they should hear the story with the same words but different visuals at least five times before being asked to repeat much of it;
4) Walk them through reading sound-by-sound, point out sounds they know, and above all TEACH PHONICS
5) make them speak in full sentences when they answer you, and try to get them formulating the full sentences as soon as possible ( I had my grade 4's answering written questions in full sentences by February.)
Btw, I can't take credit for most of this. A teacher named Wendy Maxwell came up with most of it. This is just my personal summary.
This is it. This is what I want to do with the next few years of my professional life. Think there are any principals out there who care enough to let me try?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-07 06:59 am (UTC)I started taking French in Grade 4 (in the 70s, when grammar was still being taught) -- I wound up dropping it in Grade 12 (as I recall... it's been a while!) when we were assigned Gabrielle Roy's Rue Deschambault. I'm an avid reader, don't get me wrong -- but suddenly being faced with a 300+ page novel entirely in French? I tried reading it, didn't understand what was going on after the first ten pages or so, and gave up the whole class (also, we had an awful teacher whose children were harassing me, but that's another story). It's one thing to read short stories and then do reading comprehension quizzes -- it's another thing entirely to be faced with a huge book and then have to write an essay on it, all in another language.
But the thing that really bugged me about public school French was that it had no application to the real world. We didn't do much in the way of conversation exercises, we didn't learn anything practical, and we never took it outside the classroom. I learned far more in a few sporadic classes at the Law Society when I worked there, than I learned in roughly 9 years of school. I'm a big fan of experiential learning -- if we'd been taught French in the context of home ec or law class or whatever, I'd have probably held onto more of it in the long term. (There was no immersion at the time, where we were, but I don't think that's necessarily the answer, either.)
Let's just hope the Conservatives don't get in and scrap bilingualism entirely (they are, after all, based on the same constituency that formed groups intended to "preserve English"). :P
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-07 07:36 am (UTC)Yeah, use is an important lack in Anglo-Canadian French teaching. Really the only practice I got outside the classroom (before I started reading European academics ;)) was reading the French language side of the packaging on junk food. What I learned was that French basically like English but backwards and with more words with 'eau' in them.
Brilliant Idea...
Date: 2004-06-07 12:23 pm (UTC)I hope that some day you and your colleagues pull this revolution off. It only makes perfect sense to teach children to speak before spelling... I mean, how else did I learn english? :)
Re: Brilliant Idea...
Date: 2004-06-07 01:42 pm (UTC)You know what?
Date: 2004-11-16 07:58 pm (UTC)If you don't mind, I am going to add this to my memories so that I can use it for the languages Cole and I will be learning together.
Re: You know what?
Date: 2004-11-17 01:30 am (UTC)If you'd like a copy of the master's thesis by Wendy Maxwell, called The Gesture Approach, I could get a copy for you. I believe it cost around $20 Canadian, and it's distributed through a tiny independent publisher catering solely to the school market. The approach is gaining momentum, and though it's not perfect, it does address the first several years of language learning better than any other I've seen.