If young people don’t want to learn languages, it might be because the teaching materials are so drearily trendy
Tonight’s homework: learn ‘Bonjour’, ‘Je m’appelle,’ ‘Comment t’appelles-tu?’ ‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va bien’, ‘Pas mal’, and ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’. And the tired child, already sick to death of French, having been taught it since the age of three but never methodically, starts climbing the Everest of trying to master these horrible, spiky phrases, with their sudden apostrophes, their unexplained hyphens, and the dangly fives under some but not all of the ‘c’s.
‘Try to remember: there’s an “s” on the end of “t’appelles”,’ we say. The child keeps forgetting. And we can quite see why. He’s grammarless. We parents, having learned French in the 1960s and ’70s from our colourless but thorough W.F.H. Whitmarsh (A Simpler French Course) or J.R. Watson (La Langue des Français), know how much grammar is wrapped up in that ‘t’appelles-tu’: it’s the interrogative second-person singular of a reflexive verb. Quite delicious in its way. The modern benighted ten-year-old has no idea of this. For him it’s just a word which mysteriously has an ‘s’, sometimes.
We wonder why modern languages are in such steep decline in British schools. French has been knocked out of the top ten most-taken GCSE subjects, replaced by religious studies. The number of students taking French at GCSE has decreased steadily from 350,000 in 2007 to 150,000 in 2011. Only 13,850 students took A-level French last year, a drop of 3 per cent in 12 months. There are many reasons, but one of them, surely, has to be throwing children straight into the whirlpool of chit-chat without a paddle.
No one could accuse the ubiquitous school textbook Encore Tricolore of colourlessness. Every page is a riot of smiling faces and cartoon pictures. Page one, lesson one has characters with speech bubbles saying, ‘Je m’appelle Sophie. Et toi, comment t’appelles-tu?’ As with the Cambridge Latin Course, which has replaced L.A. Wilding’s Latin Course for Schools (‘mensa, mensa, mensam’) as the standard textbook, the current philosophy of language teaching is that students should get straight into making casual remarks (‘Caecilius est in horto. Caecilius in horto sedet’), in order to simulate the experience of being plunged into a street in Pompeii or La Rochelle.
If you really lived among the natives in Pompeii or La Rochelle for three months, you would learn to speak Latin or French. But it’s not going to happen through casual banter over two 40-minute lessons a week in a British school.
And what remarks they are taught to make! Trying to attract children by being ‘fun’ and up-to-date, the Tricolore textbooks manage to combine relentless cheerfulness and busyness with a strange dreariness and datedness. Pity the antisocial, unsporty child, I always think, as I flick through Tricolore. The characters are forever going to the cinéma, the discothèque, the piscine, the club des jeunes, or for a promenade with their copains. Things are sympa, super, OK or nul. They keep asking each other which sport they enjoy most (jouer au foot, faire la natation, faire du ski or going out on their vélo tout terrain). It’s exhausting.
‘Tu veux aller à une boum demain soir?’ one teenager asks another in Encore Tricolore 4 (these books go on to GCSE level). I’ve asked my friend in Paris and no one says boum for ‘party’ any more, she tells me. It was a 1980s/’90s word. Nowadays it’s a slightly camp word for a surprise party. That’s what comes of trying to be up-to-the-minute. The characters listen to their baladeur (Walkman) and their magnétophone (cassette player). The book tries to inspire dazzlement over the TGV. One exercise involves filling in the missing words in this: ‘Le TGV est un … très rapide qui fait de … voyages, par example de Paris à Lyon. Recemment, on a inventé le TGV Duplex …’ (that’s the double-decker one, 1995).
When I shut my eyes and think of France, I see: a little hilltop town glinting in the sunset; the gardens at Versailles, the floodlit Palais des Papes in Avignon; a village square with café tables and wicker chairs; a man in a beret on a bicycle; a vineyard heavy with grapes. The 21st-century student of French in British schools emerges able to hold forth on: Planète Futuroscope (the multimedia theme park near Poitiers), no doubt fun to visit but certainly no fun to hear about; le réchauffement climatique, le recyclage, the rise of la dipsomanie among les jeunes, and la famille en crise. They’re steeped in worthy topical issues. Is it any wonder they’re not in love with France?
And the vocab lists! In our family we call this ‘pamplemousse syndrome’. Rather than thinking of the hundred words you might actually use the most, textbook writers draw up thematic vocabulary lists: fruit; clothing; stationery; computing, etc. So children learn the words for grapefruit, tracksuit, homework diary and shift key before they learn to say ‘I was’.
Tricolore is by no means the only textbook of this glossy, cartoon- and photograph-filled kind. Some say it’s the best of a bad bunch. It does have a ‘dossier langue’ box in each section, where, if you look hard, you can actually find some grammatical rules. Elan, Panorama, Ici, Latitudes, Façon de Parler — all these textbooks jostle for attention in Foyles, and they all look much the same. With their relentless pictorial, broken-up pages, they’re reacting against the humourlessness of the old textbooks we were brought up on.
In one corner of a small prep-school in Surrey, Milbourne Lodge, a schoolmaster called Paul Angus teaches French superbly to 11- to 13-year-olds with his own teaching notes. He has calmly and systematically thought through the language of French: how it works, and how to get it across. I sat in on one of his lessons last week — the ‘DRAPERS VAN MMT’ lesson, where you learn which verbs take ‘être’ in the passé composé and how the participles have to agree with the person or people doing them — and the boys lapped it up. They relished being stretched and not patronised. The lesson was not dressed up as fun, but fun came from the satisfaction of getting the hang of it. Are there more such language teachers left in Britain?