Exchanging language skills (French/English)

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

For those of you with kids who are now writing in French, I'd be interested in doing a 'swap'.

I correct your kids' French work, you correct my son's English work. He's a 6th grader, so not quite high school yet, but reads fluently, and writes fairly correctly. But it's coming up more and more often, that I'm not entirely sure about the way his sentences are written, but I can't correct them.

 

You can have a look at his bilingual blog:

http://parrot.ca/legofan/2009/01/01/the-medes-and-persia/

 

(you can leave him comments too, he loves that!)

Edited January 26, 2009 by CleoQc

[Joan in GE]

Hi CleoQc,

 

Right now we do have a tutor who corrects anything I've assigned for geography and French tests (essay type questions) and my other older sons who are more fluent than I, correct my letters and other things. But your sons blogs are quite interesting.

 

Don't know if you saw the post about self teaching, but I mentioned my son's online composition course where they edit and critique each other's work. I can't really sign up for more work for myself at the moment as I really come -and go here depending on the ever-changing needs of my family. (My university going 2nd son has winter break, otherwise I'm up at 6 to drive him to the train station and the day feels constantly behind after that).

 

It does seem like there should be something that could work in some way though. Maybe the children can somehow do editing for each other? I'll have to think about this.

 

By the way, I started using the EAD Belgian courses, but the Swiss wouldn't accept them in place of their own, so we stopped because their was no point working for two different systems instead of one. They seem quite well organized and very cheap.

 

Congratulations to your son for his blog.

 

Best,

Joan

[Nan in Mass]

And maybe Joan is onto something and the students could correct and critique each other... Something to think about anyway.

My son understands basic French fairly well, speaks much worse, and only barely writes. We just lost our French tutor, who was mostly working on conversation, so now I'm going to shift to working on written French. He could write, and yes, it would be useful to have someone other than me to correct, but you'd have a huge amount of work because almost every word is wrong. I won't have him write papers in French until next year, probably. Then I would be very interested in an exchange. Remember that I'm not a writer, though. I can point out where something sounds awkward or is phrased a different way in English, but I wouldn't volunteer myself to proof a high school English paper.

 

I like your son's blog. I can make a suggestion for the paper that comes up, too. Usually in English, two people (or countries or whatever) see eye to eye, or don't see eye to eye, or one person sees eye to eye with the other, or one person doesn't see eye to eye with the other, but one person shares a point of view with another person, or sees the point of view of another person. In your son's paper, he should use point of view rather than eye. He's doing very well, all things considered. If English were his first language, I would also point out that some of his short sentences could be combined into longer ones.

 

Anyway, something to consider.

-Nan

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

I'm not a high school teacher as well. The goal of this exchange - and yes, it can be next year , I still have quite a few years ahead of me as a homeschooler ;-) - is more to correct the usage of the language, and not the actual paper-writing itself. That is best done in one's own language and does transfer quite nicely from one language to another. But idioms? Trust me, they're a pain to learn!

 

I'm also open to the idea of the kids correcting each other and giving each other feedback. That's a nice way of giving them some responsibilities!

[Nan in Mass]

Usage I can do fine. : )

-Nan