This fall, I am not only teaching in Paris but temporarily directing a program of study abroad. Among the many other changes this shift has produced in my daily life, I find myself no longer on the sidelines of students’ acquisition of French. I am now in charge of the French classes, or FLE (Français comme langue étrangère), that the students take through a branch of the Sorbonne.
As many Lingua Franca readers know, American programs of study abroad divide into two basic types: those that require a working knowledge of the local language before coming to the country, and those that accept English speakers and teach their courses in English. The program I am directing falls into the second category, but all students are required to study French here, and several are sufficiently fluent to take university courses in French. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on the balance between grammar, or structured learning, versus a more conversational approach in learning a language.
Our partners in the French-learning business are most adept at teaching classes at the “B” and “C” levels, according to the European Reference Framework for Language Learning. Students who arrive in Paris hoping to take classes at the Sorbonne or other institutions need generally to get their expertise up to the B2 level, so they tend to arrive with the basics already under their belt -- not to mention that most Erasmus students or students from former French colonies often arrive speaking at least two other languages. But American students, even those with a couple of years of college French, often do not attain a B2 or even B1 level. In our case, the French program was game to initiate classes at A levels, and so I have been able to witness the built-in tension between formal and conversational language learning -- or, put another way, between beginning with grammatical structures or beginning with casual modes of communication -- that seems to haunt language learning. I am not a teacher of French, or any foreign language, so mine is only a bystander’s view, but I suspect that the problem for American students is compounded by their confusion about grammar in their native tongue.
Here’s the issue, I think, in a nutshell. On one side, you have language teachers and learners who point out that babies don’t learn their mother tongues by learning grammar first. They acquire the language by being immersed in it, and the grammar follows naturally; later on, perhaps, they can learn to make sense of why they use several different forms of past tense or when fewer is preferable to less. On the other side, you have those who point out, like one Swedish blogger, that “we, as adults, do not learn foreign languages the way babies learn their native language. And hence, speaking without any grammatical backbone whatsoever can only get us so far.” I’ve experienced this frustration myself, in trying to learn Italian via phone app. The program with which I experimented was happy to teach me the phrases Voglio un bicchiere di vino and Vorrei imparare l’italiano, but only because I know the difference between indicative and conditional do I understand that voglio and vorrei are different forms of the same verb, denoting the difference between “I want a glass of wine” and “I would like to learn Italian.” Understanding that the root verb exists makes learning its other forms far easier than trying to memorize several dozen different words.
My students in beginning French classes are generally having an immersive, conversation-based experience -- following the philosophy, articulated on the website Fluent in 3 Months, that “Grammar acts as a wall between you and fluency – holding you back from the language rather than being a vital part of it.” Like most people thrown into a foreign language, they spent most of their first couple of weeks chaotically confused. Now, I find that their response to their mode of learning depends on how they have studied other languages and the extent to which they have refined their knowledge of English grammar. Those who learned, say, Spanish in American schools find the French language classes frustrating, inefficient, and less than helpful. “I need a structure,” one student complained to me, “or it’s all just a jumble of words.” Those who have had little interest in English grammar and little experience with foreign-language study tend to find, as one student put it, that “I can just go out and speak in the shops. I can order in restaurants. That’s all I need. The rest can come later.”
But what is “the rest”? In French, it entails the difference between the perfect and the imperfect, with no simple past tense to bridge the gap; if you don’t know what perfect means in English, you have a concept to learn before you can start using the structure to help your French learning. Ditto conditional, subjunctive, possessive pronoun (which, importantly, becomes possessive adjective in French), reflexivity. Whether we like it or not, very few high-school students, and only a minority of college students, grasp these ideas in English. Should the foreign-language teacher, then, be tasked with introducing the concepts themselves as well as conveying vocabulary, accent, useful phrases, and so on? Or should they skip all that, putting at risk their students’ ability to build on the structure of the language? To these questions I have no answer -- but this fall has shown me more than ever that teaching a foreign language to 20-year-old American students is a daunting, even confounding task.
