About those grammar exercises . . .

[jld]

Dd commented to me tonight that the e-mail she got this afternoon from her French grandfather was not very well-written, filled with (she thought) grammar and spelling mistakes. Well, I don't know about grammar mistakes, but yes, there may have been punctuation mistakes and maybe some spelling errors (I'm not sure). I'm sure anything dh would write would have spelling mistakes and punctuation errors in it, in any language.

 

Dh and dgf went through the French school system. Dd went through Amsco's French 2 Years book 3 years ago and did well gradewise, but has asked me to go through it with her again because she doesn't feel she remembers it as well as she would like and doesn't think she really internalized it. Is it possible some of us remember grammar better when we study it, and some of us just don't?

 

We're still going to do French grammar with all our kids, no matter what, but I'm wondering about how effective grammar instruction is in improving communication skills. I suppose it may be more effective for some than others, and we have to adjust accordingly.

 

Personally, I would be begging for grammar lessons if I were to study another language, but I could see how others might just prefer total immersion, and accept whatever level of correctness that would bring them to. I guess we all have different standards we are aspiring to. Maybe it just comes down to knowing our goals and trying whatever we can think of to reach them.

[Nan in Mass]

My goal was to have my children be able to talk to someone, watch a movie, read a book, and travel. Immersion work really really well for those goals! Now, as we are having to take college applications into account, I am thinking about whether I want to add "put French on the high school transcript and take the French SAT II" to that goal. Those are going to require grammar. Sigh.

 

I've never been fully immersed in a language I haven't studied. If I were, I think I'd probably want the shortcuts that grammar provides, too. But for travel purposes, my family likes Pimsleur tapes. They seem to be a good middle ground between grammar and immersion.

 

-Nan

[jld]

My oldest is just a freshman this year, but it does seem like things change during hs. Before we could just play around, but now everything seems so serious, and seems to have to be documented.

 

Nan, are you just going to call what he's doing French I, and French II, or something like that, and write up a course description? I think that may be what I'll do. And I'd really like dd to take the AP French test. She took a look at the practice problems on one the other day and that's how she decided she needs to work more on grammar and writing.

 

About understanding movies . . . hats off to your son. I have trouble understanding movies in French. Actually, I still have trouble understanding French. I don't read much in the language (while constantly telling my kids to:001_huh:), which is unfortunate, because I'm sure that would help. Hey kids, do as I say, not as I do . . .

[Nan in Mass]

Until this year, I was just going to have my son read some literature in French along with his literature in English all lumped together under the subject great books. Then, when we made the transcript, we were going to look at the number of books he had read and assign an appropriate amount of credit. I thought about calling the class French Lit, but that sounds like he read it in translation. I asked here and a number of people told me that they had started doing French literature for French 3. (Sigh. In my high school, we read Little Prince at the end of the 4th year, and that was a big step up. I could only manage because I already knew the book well in English. French 3 sounded very low to me. Ah well.)

 

Then Joan came up with the idea of doubling up and doing something like history in French at a lower grade level, and we added in the Bordas Francais 6e. Now I really don't know what I am going to do when it comes time to assign credits LOL. I'm not too worried about it yet, since it is still a ways off. I suppose it depends how well he manages with the grammar and writing, and whether he takes the SAT II. He is reading Spielvogel's Western Civ for great books and reading all those primary sources, so I don't feel badly about giving him high school history credit even though the text book in which he is answering quesitons in a 6th grade one. I might wind up making a topic heading of French and then putting Histoire/Géographie 6e and Français 6e and Littérature Française. That would at least make it obvious that he was working in French. At least the words history and geography and literature are about the same in both languages and won't cause confusion.

 

With his brother, my transcript strategy was just to do the best we could education-wise, keep track of everything, and then divide it all up into courses at the end when I went to write the transcript. I listed the courses by subject, not date, because many weren't studied all in a lump in the course of one year. I tried to give the courses descriptive names so their content would be obvious at a glance. I put in superscripts explaining which courses were taken at community college or required extensive travel.

 

I probably should go look at the sample French AP (doubt we'll get threre!) and the French SAT II. With his brother, I tried to have outside confirmation of his ability to do at least some academic subjects. He had an SAT score and community college grades in math, science, and English.

 

Are you going to put it on the transcript?

 

-Nan

[jld]

Yikes! I'm getting nervous about the documentation we need to do for hs, and the AP and SAT II tests. I went to two different high schools, and neither one had AP classes, and I hadn't even heard of SAT II tests until reading on the hs board recently. And I really don't have many thoughts about transcripts. DD14 just started 9th this fall, so it all just feels really new and kind of scary . . .

 

We haven't even looked at SAT II tests. We should probably try to see a French one, or sample problems of one, online, and see if dd could handle it at some point. To be honest, I thought she'd already be able to handle the AP test, but she didn't get every question right that she saw online. And some more study wouldn't hurt, anyway.

 

I think you're really smart to just list things by subjects, without dates. Then you have the whole four years to get where you want to go in the language.

 

French literature in French 3? What do they mean by that? I took Spanish I, II, III, and IV in hs and we never read anything. To be honest, once again, I never read in French or Spanish. That is a shameful admission as a former Spanish teacher:blush:, but it's the truth. I don't know if it's because I'm lazy, or because I still have little kids (I rarely read a whole book in English, either), but when I read, it's mostly online or magazines or catalogues -- short things that are easy to put down and pick up again, and don't require deep, sustained thought.

 

Oh, dear, I really am getting that overwhelmed feeling. I feel like we just plunged into hs recently. We didn't really do schoolwork before 6th grade with dd. She would listen to books on CD or tape before that, and read sometimes, but not excessively. Mostly she played with her brothers, did some crafts, and took lots of ballet and art classes and did some creative writing.

 

Then, in the fall of 2006 we moved to France, and she said she wanted to do full-time heavy schoolwork. So she did the 4th, 5th, and 6th Spectrum math books that year, and read tons of Sonlight suggested titles, plus whatever French books we got from the library or found at Carrefour. She also did that Amsco French 2 Years book, plus took ballet, art, and clarinet lessons in the town we were living in in France. In the fall of 2007 she added in Latin Prep 1 (and is still working on it:001_huh:), and about a year ago we started Spanish I (that's what I'm calling our work in Voces y Vistas, anyway, mostly oral but a little writing at the end of each chapter).

 

Last March she started Saxon Alg. I, and finished it the end of August. Beg. of Sept. she started Alg. II, and should finish by the middle of January. Two weeks ago she started Apol. Bio I and Chem I. Boy, do they take a lot of time! Maybe she'll finish them in April or so, I just don't know yet.

 

I guess we kind of started hs when dd started the Spanish I book, and for sure when she started Alg. I, but to make matters simpler, I just started calling her a freshman in Sept. But because of plunging into bio and chem at the same time (I warned her against that but she really likes sci and wanted to do it, so we ordered both books), and going quickly through math, it just seems like she's more a sophomore than a freshman. Although, she still is finishing up LL7, another :blush:, and wants to do LL8 before moving on to the Hewitt hs lit courses.

 

Okay, I guess the bottom line is we are all over the board here, and not in a nice, neat, clean little space called freshman year!

 

To be super, super honest, Nan, I don't know what we're going to do for French. Since I didn't expect freshman year to be as scattered as it is turning out to be, I can only imagine where we'll be this time next year, much less junior or senior year. But wherever we're going, I feel like we are racing there!

 

And I'll save those worries for another post, because this one is already way too long.

[Nan in Mass]

I'll post more later with my method of keeping track of it all and making it into a transcript, but it sounds to me like you are doing fine. Don't worry. :)

[Nan in Mass]

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19210&highlight=french

 

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?p=171381&highlight=french

 

As you can see, our plan has morphed since then.

Once again, I'm dashing off (college sons home this week) but I'll be back.

-nan

[jld]

My goodness. I can't believe how much French reading (and at what a high level) Eliana did in high school. Well, dd will be on her own if she wants to do all that. I certainly can't help her!

 

I think I'll show her Eliana's post and see if she wants to buy some of those books when she's in France. Then she can work on them as time permits. I guess she could write about them if she wants, and then her dad can go over the writing with her.

 

Man, I am so out of my league . . .

[Nan in Mass]

Don't worry. Just about everyone is out of Eliana's league. We consider ourselves very lucky to have her here on the board, she is such a good resource. She received and is giving her children a very special education, one that the rest of us can only dream about. Her English and history lists are equally amazing. That's why she has her own tag.

 

I need to reread those posts, now that I've refound them. I'm closer to needing to use them now.

 

With my older son, I did high school differently than most people on this board. I thought about what I wanted him to know as an adult, roughly (things like "be able to communicate well"). Then I looked at the requirements for our local high school and those of most colleges (4 English, 4 math, etc.). There was a major gap between those two lists LOL, and I had to have both. Next I decided on a strategy for accomplishing both lists and gave some thought as to how I was going to demonstrate to college that my son had done the work on his transcript and would be able to do college level work if they accepted him. This son doesn't test well, so lots of SAT2s or APs or CLEPs weren't an option. I didn't want to give grades, so that meant we probably were going to have to have extra outside assessment of his abilities. Almost all colleges want to see at least ACT or SAT scores, so we decided to have him take the SATs with PSATs as prep. We decided that community college classes in some academic subjects would work both to show that he could do college level work and as confirmation of at least part of what he had done. (The other option was online classes.) That meant that he had to go junior year, so he would have some on his transcript when he applied fall of senior year. Then I decided what would make a course in our homeschool. I decided that I would count the travelling, since this was a huge part of his education, but not the gymnastics; I'd leave that as an extra curricular activity. And I decided that for something to count as a course, I wanted it to have an academic componant. That gave me some idea of how to structure things. Then I decided how I wanted to structure our time. My son took care of that by asking if we could please keep doing things the way we always had. And last, I decided how my son was going to learn each of the things on the lists and what resources we needed. I made a rough plan of this and decided that I would change it as needed as we went along. Then I figured out a way to keep track of everything we did, something better than a box of papers and notebooks, since much of it wasn't going to produce any written evidence. I got a notebook and divided it into broad subjects. I started with math, natural history, chemistry, physics, great books, fun reading, world history, US history, peace studies, physical education, art, music, writing, Latin, computers, and living skills. I wound up adding geography, French, Japanese, Native American studies, scifi, and work. Every time he did something - read a book, learned to type, finished a text book, did a project, watched a video, wrote a paper, etc., I wrote it in the notebook under some subject. Then, as high school went along, I would look at the book and decided things like, "Well if he reads two more books and writes a paper, I could lump these things together and give him half a credit for blank." Many schools and teachers put their syllabi online. You can do a search and see what sorts of things and how many things a particular class typically does, just to make sure you are in line with what colleges are expecting when they see English 1 on a transcript. I used the transcript as a way to translate our loose, flexible, somewhat non-conventional education into standard terms so that colleges could compare my son to other students. With the transcript, I sent a "school profile" in which I explained how we had actually done the things on the transcript, why I didn't list dates, and why I didn't grade. I also sent a "guidance councilor recommendation" in which I pointed out my son's strengths. Along with those, my son had a community college transcript, recommendations from a CC professor and his advisor, and recommendations from his gymnastics coaches. There are lots of ways to do this (portfolios being one), but I found this one to be an easy one to use for a flexible, non-conventional high school experience. The book "The Homeschooler's Guide to Transcripts and Portfolios" by Heuer is good. It helps you to sort out what your goals are, how to translate them into courses, and how to document everything for colleges and your local school system.

 

I think it sounds like your daughter is doing fine. You are in the enviable position of having a daughter who is now self-motivated and self-educating. That is something many of us are trying hard to achieve.

 

I think Jane in NC may have just solved my Latin problem. I think I had better talk to my son about his goals in French and other languages. I know he wants to learn others, bit I think he wants to do it immersion-style, which is going to take planning... And he needs to have one, at least, that is close to what colleges are asking for.

 

-Nan

[In The Great White North]

French literature in French 3? What do they mean by that? I took Spanish I, II, III, and IV in hs and we never read anything.

 

Are you sure they didn't mean French III in college? We never read anything remotely resembling literature in high school. Real reading started with the 300 courses in college (for German and Russian)

[Nan in Mass]

I didn't, either, except for Le Petit Prince at the end of the last year, and it was a huge struggle, despite its simplicity. Maybe their schools were much better than mine. If you can do it in college, it seems like you should be able to do it in high school. How many years do you study a language in a European high school before you get to reading literature?

-Nan

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

How many years do you study a language in a European high school before you get to reading literature?

-Nan

 

That's a good question! My son is doing his second year of Spanish, and there's no literature in sight. According to the European standards of bilingualism, literature is at the C1 level. That would be 5th year at the minimum, unless someone manages to get immersion for a good length of time.

A1 is basically first year, then A2, followed by B1 and B2. A good dedicated student will do one level a year. Some may take two years per level.

[jld]

When dh looked at Eliana's post the other day, he said it sounded like what he did in high school in France. He was wondering if she attended a lycee francais.

 

He also said that he doesn't remember reading books when he was in high school English class, just articles from newspapers, and that was only the last 3 years of high school.

 

I didn't read Spanish until college, either, and just as another poster said, in my 300 level classes. And to be honest, I didn't understand it very well. Comprehension is really hard for me in any language, it seems.

 

Nan, thanks for explaining how you have documented hs for your kids. It seems like we just need to read and read about different ways of doing it, and then sort of forge our own path. Hopefully that will get us where we want to go!

[Ester Maria]

How many years do you study a language in a European high school before you get to reading literature?

-Nan

I was educated in Italy, though I have to admit it was in one of the "better" schools, so my experience cannot be the representative one.

 

I studied French and English as foreign languages (one from elementary, and one from what would correspond to "middle school" level). Most of the instruction received prior to the 8th grade was, to say the least, symbolic - it consisted of learning the language at the level of "practical usefulness" (meaning learning the language through various potential "situations" one could find oneself in - conversing with the authorities, booking a hotel, explaining to a doctor what hurts you, etc.) combined with some of what they deemed "typical children experience" (so we had some texts related to school, games we played, lives of children in the countries whose languages we were studying, etc.), and all of that wrapped with grammar.

 

So at the point we hit "high school" (which, depending on the definition, can mean 8th or 10th grade; school system in Italy is a bit different than in the US) we technically weren't beginners, but we definitely weren't at the level that you could give us a novel aimed at native speakers our age and expect us to get it. My school, however, had a sink or swim approach to that. They used the first year to catch up on grammar and fill any "holes" we might have had in our knowledge, and to bomb us with a plethora of short texts - so we had weekly (or even twice a week) "readings" which typically consisted of 3-5 pages we had to prepare at home for class discussion (meaning we had to get out of it any vocabulary we don't understand, find definitions for them in monolingual dictionary, write them down and learn them, do some kind of linguistic exercise related to the text, etc.) - the texts included articles, discussion, excerpts from popular novels, a variety of things, but all of it was genuine, unadapted material. So little by little, we started catching up. For each of our language classes we had to read a full novel that year, with all of the unknown vocabulary written down from monolingual dictionaries (it may seem like I overemphasize that, but it was a huge help later) and we had a choice between a few books in each class, the same books literary excerpts from taken from. We also had to write a book report on that, and that was sort of a milestone for further study.

 

In 9th grade literature became a regular part of both French and English curriculum. We still studied other things and brushed up on grammar, but had a few books per semester to read, discuss, hold presentations about, write papers about, and with time it just became easier and progressed towards more and more complex works. By the end of high school, we were reading the exact same works native speakers of our age we reading in their schools. I remember reading Maupassant and Zola for French, Shakespeare and Wilde for English, and many other works, for school, though most of us during the high school period started to read for pleasure in foreign languages as well.

 

It's definitely not impossible, but you do have to break the ice at some point, at least with the languages you have no other exposure to. It's the easiest to do it with a couple of modern novels, or crime novels, something like that, with a relatively easy language and interesting plot to lead you through it, rather than hitting the great books right away.

 

The thing with Europe is that they have a different strategy of learning a foreign language. They don't do it by intensive instruction through a couple of semesters but, rather, through gradual exposure over the years - that way when you start reading you will have had the language "in your ear" for years already, as opposed to starting to read after a few semesters of intense study, so even if in those two cases you start reading with what's objectively the same "amount" of knowledge, it's easier if you had already internalized most of that knowledge, if you feel like the language had already become a part of you, etc. "Slow and steady wins the game.", that's basically what's the approach there, as opposed to the US system where they try to squeeze it all in high school period only, from the alphabet to the classics in the original.

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

When dh looked at Eliana's post the other day,

Could anyone point me to that post please???

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

In 9th grade literature became a regular part of both French and English curriculum.

 

This is similar to my experience. I started English in grade 3, although I failed repeatedly, year after year after year. After grade 8, my parents shipped me to London UK, in a last dash effort to get me near fluency. I remember we started reading books in grade 7. I was stuck with baby books (I never could quite understand Dr. Seuss....) By grade 8 I was in Judy Bloome but didn't get much of them. The other kids in the class were much more advanced. In grade 9 we were expected to read classics and present book reports orally. I remember someone reading Animal Farm. Now, grade 9 was after my stay in London, and I was able to read Lord of the Rings and present that. Each presentation was an hour long btw. During my summer stay in London, we read A Tale of Two Cities which wasn't too bad for us because it contains a lot of French.

 

in grade 11 - our last year of high school - I read Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare.

 

 

Now, Spanish was started in grade 7 and we never, in five years, make it to the classics. We did read books, and extracts, but not literature.

[jld]

Cleo, look at post #7, the second thread, to see Eliana's post.

 

Boy, I've never read Chaucer or Milton.

 

Dh said he may have read Animal Farm sometime in hs, but he wasn't sure. He said he only remembers newspaper articles. Then again, he was last in his hs English class, so . . .

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

Cleo, look at post #7, the second thread, to see Eliana's post.

Ah, but threads move around. Which one was the second one?

[Nan in Mass]

This one: http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1344461#poststop

[Joan in GE]

To get the "maturite" at the end of high school...

 

You have to do three languages with literature in all of them. The level of literature is different for your primary language and in the primary language at least, it has to cover at least two different time periods and two different genres.

 

So my son started reading the easy translated novels in 8th or 9th grade for German (2nd language) and about 9th or 10th for English (3rd language). His primary language was French, so there he was reading literature in 8th grade.

 

They tended to start with detective, high attention type at the beginning for the secondary languages, then moved to more serious stuff by the end.

 

In your secondary languages, the exam for literature consisted of a short oral exam (15 min if I remember correctly) where they would take one of the 3 books you had chosen out of 5 -6 they'd gone over in school. The evaluators would choose a passage out of one of those and then you would have to explain and analyze the passage giving brief background of the author, setting, etc. in the foreign tongue.

 

I can remember some of the books he read for English (which was treated as his 3rd language), because I thought they were such a bad choice out of all the good literature that exists, but it was his school that chose them. He read the Awakening and Lamb and..(I'll have to add the others later).

[Laura Corin]

How many years do you study a language in a European high school before you get to reading literature?

-Nan

 

We studied three novels in French between the age of 16 and 18: La Peste (The Plague, Camus), Candide, and a modern novel that I've forgotten.

 

Laura

[Nan in Mass]

Wow! Did you all feel that it was hard to do literature when you began, or was it not any harder than your previous work? When I began, it was a big jump up. I had to look up lots of words and it was very, very slow. It didn't take many books, though, before I sped up. I am wondering if US schools are trying to teach too much before they jump to real books. Perhaps they should just jump and let the student struggle for a bit until they catch on. It is a fast way to learn a language. Or is it a matter of how much time you put into it compared to US schools? How much homework did you do? In high school, I think I usually did about 20 minutes of homework, unless I was memorizing vocab for a test. This is very interesting. Thank you, everyone.

-Nan

[jld]

Dh said that for his French bac, he had to analyze a poem (there was a choice between a poem or a prose analysis, or a summary of a long text). That took 3-4 hours. For the oral exam, he had to present a list of poems the class had studied that year, and then the teacher picked one and asked him questions about it. Dh was pleased with his grade -- 11/20.

 

For foreign languages, he only did English. He had a few years of Latin and German, but they didn't go very well, so he dropped them in seconde. In his English class, they studied grammar and analyzed some texts, read those articles, and discussed them. He didn't do very well in English. I remember finding his hs English notebook in his parents' attic many years ago, and thumbing through it. It was empty, lol.

 

To save a little face for him . . . he did really well in math and physics (18/20 in terminale). He was in the math/physics track in hs (one of five tracks available at that time), and I don't think he was required to do as much work in languages. Also, he graduated in 1984, so certainly a lot has changed since then.

[jld]

We didn't read anything in hs. I didn't read Spanish until the lit classes I took in college (second semester sophomore year). They were so hard. I always struggled. It took so long to look up words, and I never did learn to analyze literature. I don't think I could teach Spanish literature; actually, I am sure I can't. I would have to go back to college and get some decent training this time.

 

That's why my goals for dd are pretty modest in Spanish: get through the three Scott Foresman Spanish books, and then buy her some children's novels to read. If she wants to do some writing, I'll look it over and offer correction. She really needs to decide how far she wants to go with any of this. I just want her to understand and speak Spanish fairly well, as Spanish just seems more and more important for people who want to live in the U.S.