Back in January I wrote of Tom and Freddie, not to mention their parents and grandparents, being flummoxed by the so-called "partitive articles" they had to learn in French homework assignments. For a couple of weeks, by Zoom, on Wednesday mornings (afternoons, in their zone) I tried to teach them the phrases they were meant to be learning, until it dawned on me that this was doomed to failure because they hadn't a clue how to read French aloud from a page and were thoroughly disheartened by the whole subject. Nobody had ever taught them how to pronounce French words.
So once a week, over the course of a month or so, before their school reopened, I began to give the boys some basic rules and simple exercises that entailed a great deal of reading and repetition: they had to mimic the sounds I made, not so easy given the technical frustrations of video calls and the background distractions. Once or twice the ploy worked, perhaps for half a minute at a time, and Tom at least gained a little confidence.
I pity the poor primary school teachers in London who most likely know hardly any French themselves; what probably happens in the classroom is that their teacher gives the children videos to watch in French, while they sit there quietly (or not so quietly) ignoring it all. Tom and Freddie didn't seem to know that the letters -t, -z -s, -x ... at the ends of words are rarely pronounced, and hadn't a clue how to sound out the vowel combinations ou, eu, oi, or that é and è sound different. So that's what we concentrated on. As an experienced French speaker it's easy for me to forget that anglophone beginners have no idea that Qu'est-ce que c'est? literally means What-is-it-that-it-is? and that Qu'est-ce que...? is pronounced kesskuh, not kwestkuhkwuh. The problem, especially with girls in the class, is that boys feel stupid when they're obliged to make stupid noises and, worse yet, get them wrong. Then they're liable to sulk, teenagers even more so.
I endeavoured to make a joke of it and got them to repeat a few quirky, surrealistic sentences like "Deux ours jouent avec une boule rouge sur la route." or "Qu'est-ce que c'est dans l'hélicoptère? C'est un éléphant énorme!" Whether that really worked, I'm not convinced, but they didn't run away the whole time to play with the cat or the guitar in the background, only occasionally. We also tried intoning the nasal sounds -ain -in -an -en -on -oin and so on (first while holding our noses and then not holding our noses) and the French "u"-sound. Once they got the hang of it, that didn't cause so much trouble.
Part of a French conversation I got the boys to read aloud and practise went like this:
Tu veux jouer aux boules?
-- Non, je veux jouer à Minecraft. Minecraft est mon jeu favori.
Tu veux jouer avec moi?
-- Oui. Allons-y!
It's true that Minecraft is their favourite game. And they learned to read the words for the numbers one-to-twenty, for which they already knew the sounds but not the spellings.
If you want to find out whether or not your child can read French, see if (s)he can pronounce these English words (cognates) in the French way:
six, point, cage, Paris, judo, orange, queue, plan, secret, long, cause, accident, danger, fruit, instruction
If that goes badly, that's proof that (s)he needs some more tuition and reading practice. Try typing some of those words into Google Translate, select "French", and click on the sound icon. It could be a revelation!
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