KmL a écrit :
Ajoutons qu'on a rien a envier aux aussies et anglophones parce que en general les seules langues qu'ils parlent C l'anglais et ... Ah bein C tout... C juste l'anglais. Et encore pas des fois tres mal (alors que c qd meme bcp plus simple que le francais).
Actuellement, I'd have to disagree fairly strongly there Kml, at least from an Aussie perspective. Maybe it's different in New South Wales (as the school systems tend to be different in each state of Australia) but down here in Victoria, for as long as I can remember, learning a foreign language has always been compulsory for 2 years - usually at age 13-14, and usually it's French (although it has been traditionally - and still is - the strongest foreign language in Victoria, in later years there has been more choice - between Indonesian or French, Japanese or French, Chinese, German or Italian. When I was at school, languages started at secondary school, but now the options are starting sooner, at primary school.
Some of the problems that people have listed with students learning the French language as natives, or learning English, are similar situations which I have observed a lot in Australia too - so it may be a global problem.
For example, I learned French for 2 years at age 13-14 (the teacher was from England, and we learned little from the way she taught). With a solid grounding in English from primary school, I didn't find what we did difficult, just boring. All we did was from text books, not from life - spelling, naming things, tests on matching up genders with words and pictures, present tense of about 20 major verbs and simple future and past tense for only -re, -ir -er and very little on irregulars.
Actual speaking formed almost no part of our French lessons, so what we learned wasn't really usable.
I don't think Ballarat schools have improved much in that way to this day, since I recently asked one of my nieces to say something to me (as I knew had done French for 4 years until she was allowed to stop it).
All I got was embarrassed silence and her going bright pink in the face.
When I asked her why she couldn't speak, she told me 'we don't do that sort of thing'......curious, I asked her what she DID learn....la reponse "Oh, colours and things...naming things"
Some time after that, we had a young Aussie guest at one of our Alliance Francaise dinner nights who we thought came along to our 'older group' because she was interested in the French she was studying....mais non, she just wanted us to help her with her homework!
Well, we did, but for 3rd or 4th year French, it was unbelievably easy (except for just a few of the verb conjugations, which even we had some problems with)....but then when we tried to test her "ok, what's table in French?".....she really wasn't very good!
Maybe these students can be forgiven a bit, because Australia and France are so much further away than England and France that a lot of Aussie kids may just think (like even I did at 13!) that what they've learned will never one day be useful so why bother trying to remember it?
But I think somehow some of the teachers can't be forgiven if their classes are still boring - they have so many alternative methods now - interactive CD Roms they could use, the internet, DVDs with multiple subtitle options, etc etc that we just didn't have then to try and make the learning a language much more interesting.
L'Education est un topic tres interessant & close to my heart...so I'll have to come back later with more when I've some more free time.
Kate