Download Grammar for Young Speakers of English Part 3 French

Grammar for Young Speakers of English. Part 3: French Grammar.
The relationship between written and spoken language
French people like their spoken language to flow smoothly, but want their written language to be as
precise as possible. To achieve this, they use two main techniques, which can easily be explained to
new learners.
1. If two vowels clash, such as e and a in je ai, they produce a jerky sound a little like a glottal
stop. To avoid this, the French usually knock off the first vowel and insert an apostrophe, just as in
English when we remove a letter (the word apostrophe is derived from the Greek word for a gap,
which is what we have when we remove a letter). I begin with je ai in big letters, ostentatiously
rub out the e and insert the apostrophe to make j'ai. Children then look away from the board, and
write j’ai on their sleeve with their finger. Who got it right? Who remembered the apostrophe? I’ll then
compare apostrophe and catastrophe with their English equivalent. Each time this phenomenon
occurs, I’ll reinforce it the same way, eg in c’est. The process reinforces children’s understanding of
the apostrophe, and takes just a few minutes – it has taken longer to write this than it takes to do it.
Very nearly all French apostrophes are used in this way. The most common vowel to be dropped is e,
followed by a. U may be dropped in informal speech – Tu as becomes T’as.
2. A consonant is so called because it can’t be pronounced without an accompanying vowel (voice)
sound. A consonant at the end of a word tends to bring it to a stop, with a fresh start for the next
word. This can be jerky, and French maintains flow by not pronouncing some consonant letters at the
ends of words. These are most often t and s, but some other letters are not pronounced, including d,
b, p, x, z. This forms a pattern rather than an absolute rule – count to 10 and you meet sept and huit,
and the letter will usually be pronounced to maintain flow with a following vowel. But the pattern is
recurrent and very useful.
Excellent , introduced to praise a pupil, makes a good start for explaining the pattern. Spelling and
meaning are shared with English, and children can easily pick out the letter that is not pronounced.
Then, once they can write J’ai, as above, we can write J’ai un chat on the board or compose it with
Clicker. What is the English word? What is the letter we don’t pronounce? Where is it?
3. French pronunciation tends to be smoother and more regular than English, which usually has a
point of stress in each word and a further point of stress within each phrase or sentence. Learning to
use stress accurately is a major challenge for learners of English, and moving away from it towards
more even, flowing speech is similarly difficult for learners of French (including German and Spanish
learners). We can begin with the good example from Petit Pont (http://www.little-linguist.co.uk),
animal, which is pronounced both more clearly and more evenly in French (particularly the second a,
which is pronounced as an indistinct schwa sound in English). Children need a lot of practice to learn
to do this, but practice is not mere repetition – we can present and explain good examples of native
speaker French from a wide range of sources, including ICT sources, and reinforce understanding
with songs. Zim Zam Zoum (http://www.taughtbysong.com/) is the best example I know, as children
cannot get the songs out of their heads.
Gender in nouns, and related words (articles, pronouns, adjectives).
Gender in nouns that have no gender in the real world is a big puzzle to children, and an example of
the difficulty in all language learning of dealing with systems that are not strictly logical. There is no
reason why a table, a chair or a wall should have a gender attached to it, and that languages continue
to allocate gender to such items is a quirk of humanity that can be put down to culture, tradition or
sheer force of habit depending on how polite we wish to be.
Some French teachers have argued with me on the internet that there is no point in trying to explain
gender as it is inexplicable. This begs the question of why something so basic should be inexplicable,
and religion provides an interesting parallel. Most children, having seen Egyptian pyramids,
understand that ancient religions tended to worship all manner of gods and goddesses, who had
dominion over all areas of life. They also understand that most, though not all, modern religions have
one god. This represents a big change over time. Ancient languages, Greek and Latin, divided words
into masculine and feminine (we will leave neuter for the moment) and succeeding languages did so
too. English stopped doing this about a thousand years ago, but other languages have continued.
Why? Because they like it that way and have no wish to change.
Every French or Spanish child growing up has his or her own gender reinforced whenever they are
spoken to, and it is not simply a matter of adding word endings in writing. Feminine words tend to be
pronounced with more emphasis, particularly at the end, and this feeds through into the whole pattern
of intonation of the language. We can’t give children five years’ practice before they go to school, as
children have with their own language, but we can use the additional four to six years of primary
education to introduce and practise gender before children start secondary school. This gives them
plenty of time to puzzle over it, to ask questions, to revisit it and eventually to understand that
speakers of other languages are not purely rational and logical creatures. In fact, they are much like
themselves.
French verbs.
Once the ideas of sentence and verb as the basis for communicating are clear in the child’s mind, we
can introduce French verbs as the key building block in making sentences in French. French verbs
have built up a reputation for difficulty over several centuries. The approach here is therefore offered
as a starting point that has proved popular with primary children, and led them into an understanding
of how verbs operate that goes beyond the first person. It is based partly on this simple song, written
by my colleague Joseph Biswell with some simplifications by me in the final bars to make it more
accessible to those with less obvious talents for music.
Copyright © Joseph Biswell and John Bald, 2011. All rights reserved.
Download French verb song copyrighted
And partly on observation of a pupil assessed (in my view erroneously) as dyslexic, whose main
problem was in remembering the pronouns rather than the verb. An unexpected bonus of the song is
that it will fit virtually all French verbs, including reflexives, with just a little variation in pronunciation
(such as stretching the first parts of avoir), and that it also works with negatives. I am currently using
this in the first lessons with all classes, from Year 2 onwards. The children very much enjoy singing
the songs with the gestures, and quickly identify the pronouns. The different parts of the verb are
reinforced and practised whenever possible, in positive and negative forms.
The actions are the same in all cases, beginning by singing the song with the pronouns. I started to
teach the pronouns separately in this way after an eleven year old found he could not remember
them, and so could not do his homework of learning a verb. There is nothing more direct or more
important to the pupil than je, and so this is our starting point.
Je
Tu
Il
Elle
(point to self, whole hand –finger pointing is rude)
(point to a friend, whole hand – they can’t help smiling !)
(point to a boy, not your tu friend)
(ditto a girl)
Nous Big circular sweep with both hands
Vous Point to teacher with both hands – explain that vous is a mark of respect to a grown up. With
very young children, I sometimes also say I'm twice as big as they are
Ils
Point to two boys both hands
Elles Point to two girls both hands
We practise simple questions once we've done some singing - "hands up if you're il/elle". Who thinks
nous means we? Who thinks it means they? etc. (I teach the French for hands up etc in the second
and subsequent lessons - for the moment, I want them to identify personally with their gender.) It’s
worth noting that all of the plural pronouns end in s.
The next step is experimental. The normal pattern is to teach regular verbs first, and to introduce the
negative much later. Instead, I am now beginning with être, as the most common verb, and moving to
regular verbs later. I also begin with a negative, explaining how do not in English
becomes ne and pas in French, which we put round the verb like a sandwich. (I’ve explained
separately the practice of knocking off a vowel when two clash, eg tu ne es pas would be jerky, so we
have tu n’es pas.) We sing this with shaking of the head as well as the actions we've learned with
pronouns :
Je ne suis pas
Tu n’es pas
Il n’est pas
Elle n’est pas
Nous ne sommes pas
Vous n’êtes pas
Ils ne sont pas
Elles ne sont pas
We practise this much as we did the pronouns, and I help the children pick out the letters that are not
pronounced, noticing that they are at the ends of words.
Then we remove the negative, and sing, with same actions,
Je suis
Tu es
Il est
Elle est
Nous sommes
Vous êtes
Ils sont
Elles sont
We practise a lot, making very simple positive and negative sentences, eg Je suis poli(e) Je suis
anglais(e), and sing any other verbs we might want to use. Everything is kept very simple, but
observation shows that children from seven onwards can begin to distinguish between il est and ils
sont, as well as between more obviously difficult pairs (eg je suis, elle n’est pas) that we might give
them for practice in the early stages.
The idea of the sandwich came from Jo Rhys-Jones. I thought of putting the negative first, as it
seemed easier to take it off than to put it on. We reinforce the idea of pas with Not Now Bernard,
which I’ve translated (Pas maintenant, Bernard) and which they already know. We also explain the
connections between spoken and written French, focusing, whenever they occur, on letters that are
not pronounced at the ends of words and on the pattern of knocking the vowel off a short word and
inserting the apostrophe. When we write, we look away from the board and trace words or phrases on
our arm with our finger – we then write them on a board or in a book, only when we’re sure we can
get them right. We do not write much in the early stages and never copy, but what we write, we try to
write as accurately as possible, and do not go past mistakes.
Making sure that the children understand the full range of pronouns, and negative and positive forms,
provides an important scaffold for future learning, as these recur in the use of all verbs. I had originally
moved to avoir after être; but now tend to move towards more regular verbs – regarder, écouter,
jouer, penser, manger – which are easier to remember and introduce regular patterns.
This teaching has made clear to me the following two patterns that seem are common to all French
verbs – the tu form ends in s (il never does), and the ils/elles form in nt. Nearly as regular is nous with
–ons, which applies everywhere except for nous sommes. Vous with –ez seems to apply except for
vous êtes and vous faîtes, which are pretty close to each other.
These patterns recur in other tenses, including those made with auxiliary verbs, which I propose to
term helping verbs, after the German – even in conditionals and subjunctives. They are a long way
from regularity, but there are enough of them to make life a lot easier once we have picked them out.
Learning new verbs becomes less daunting if there are some parts of each that we already know.
Two more quick points at this stage. First, verbs are important words, and, like people, have a name.
All children know what a name is, and this is much easier for them to learn than infinitive. Second,
the idea of time can be introduced at an early stage with time words or phrases, hier, aujourd’hui,
demain – eg Aujourd’hui, c’est lundi, hier c’était dimanche, demain sera mardi.
Given a regular half hour lesson that is not bumped off by other activities and from which children are
not withdrawn, plus a little regular practice between lessons, this approach can give primary children
a clear idea of the key grammatical features they need to in order to understand French and
communicate in it.