The Quebec Association of French Teachers has taken the initiative to ask the Ministry of Education to integrate the reform project of the past participles agreement which has been circulating for several years. This would mean getting rid of the exceptions and limiting the agreement of past participles to two rules: henceforth, the one used with being would always agree with the subject of the verb and the one used with having would always be invariable.
To grant a past participle, you must:
1. identify the past participle;
2. identify his assistant;
3. apply the tuning rule according to said auxiliary.
Even by abolishing the exceptions and reducing the chord rules to two, we will encounter the same obstacles: some will classify the auxiliary badly (I was surprised: to be or to have?), Others will still and always grant a participle. past tense used with having with the subject and still others will not even see the mysterious past participle.
In short, the agreement of past participles will remain difficult. What to do then? Match all past participles with the subject? Leave them all unchanged? This may seem like a successful solution, but when you understand the language system (because there is one, and it makes more sense than it seems at first glance), it wouldn’t make sense. What to do, then? Abolish past participles?
For about fifteen years, I have been giving the Reinforcement course in French and consolidation workshops in French written at the French help center of my CEGEP. At the start of the term, when I ask them what their difficulties are, the students answer me in chorus: the agreement of past participles! Then I make them write, I give them a diagnostic dictation, and I see the same thing, year after year: the past participles have their backs wide. The texts are riddled with misconceptions of all kinds (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.), spelling errors, homophonic confusions, misplaced or forgotten commas, poorly constructed sentences and poorly used words. . And the past participles? Drowned in this ocean of errors, they are the least of my worries, honestly.
The grammatical difficulties of these pupils are generalized. And it is often the same pupils who struggle to understand less complex texts, to write an introduction and to develop a secondary idea. Those who only really struggle with past participles, I can save them in two steps, three movements, even with the current rules. But those who struggle with EVERYTHING, while at the same time what is more, need much more than reform of past participles.
The tree that hides the forest
To teach all the tuning rules of past participles is to focus on poor exceptions: a study on The frequency of use of past participle rules (Leroy and Leroy, 1995) has shown that past participles do not constitute than 22% of verbal forms. And 92% of these past participles already agree as proposed by the reform. This means that only 8% of past participles are “eccentric”, as Annie Desnoyers says; 8% from 22%, this represents 1.7% of the verbs.
Elementary and secondary school teachers say they spend a lot of time teaching these rules. Why ? Why dwell at length on exceptions? My guess is cruel, but here it is: no matter what, it’s much easier to teach past participle chord rules than to teach reading and writing to students who can’t. not, than to mend broken syntax or to enrich the starving vocabulary of a teenager who does not like to read or write.
The young person who arrives with difficulty and misery in CEGEP (and we guess that the one or the one who really has a lot of difficulty in French does not succeed) is also hiding behind the past participles. He does not understand why, after 11 successful years of French lessons, he still makes so many mistakes. It can only be the fault of the past participles! When you cook it a little, however, he admits that he has difficulty reading and composing texts, with or without past participles, since elementary school.
Well, believe it or not, if we give him help (an hour or two a week), if he accepts this help and invests in his learning, this young martyr of the past participle improves significantly. in just a few weeks. Without even needing to modify (or even address) the rule of agreement of past participles. He will never be Bernard Pivot, but there is hope.
A necessary reform?
The language evolves, it is alive, and its system can be improved. If simplifying the past participle chord rules frees up class time to tackle the other rules and ultimately improve reading and writing skills, we obviously cannot be against it. But is such a reform really necessary to free up this time? Does the Department of Education really require high school teachers to spend hours on exceptions – and on the prepositional group, while we’re at it?
It is the content and the pedagogical strategies that must be reviewed, from a transversal perspective. Young people should be confronted with increasingly complex texts and literary works and be accompanied in their reading. They should produce texts regularly, and language skills should be corrected and assessed, constructively, in all subjects. The syntax, the vocabulary, everything.
It is also in aid measures that we must innovate. All schools should have the means to offer special assistance in French to those who need it, from elementary to secondary school. And they would benefit from drawing inspiration from the assistance measures deployed in CEGEPs and universities, in particular French language assistance centers and the peer tutoring formula.
Yes, reform is needed. But it does not concern past participles.