If past participles give you nightmares, your ordeal may soon be over. Teachers have presented to the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, a reform of past participles that could save a lot of time and headaches for students and teachers alike.
So what could concretely change?
The idea would be to eliminate the exceptions on which teachers have to spend a lot of time, such as the agreement of a past participle with a pronominal verb.
The vice-president of the Quebec Association of French Teachers (AQPF), Alexandra Pharand, also gives the following example:
The death of the man I so longed for.
“Often, what we will say is that here, the direct complement is placed before. But is the direct complement death or man?” asks the French teacher.
With the new rule, no more headaches.
Basically, according to what we can read in the article by The Pressthe reform proposes that:
- Past participles without an auxiliary agree like an adjective with the noun or pronoun.
- Past participles with the auxiliary be agree with the subject.
- The past participles with the auxiliary avoir are invariable.
Reluctant to change
This proposal to recast past participles is not unanimously accepted.
“However, it’s not complicated!! Seriously, just learn it. Why always simplify everything for our young people?”, can we read on Facebook in the comments under an article on the subject.
To this kind of criticism, Alexandra Pharand replies that “a language, for it to be alive, it must be updated”.
“Just as in a language, there are words that appear according to usage, there are words that disappear because it does not correspond to the reality of the speakers”, she indicates, while by emphasizing that certain rules of past participles come straight from the 15th century.
She estimates the time needed to teach Quebec students the rules of past participle agreement at 80 hours. “It’s so much time that could be reinvested in better ways,” she says.
The goal is to stop focusing on the exceptions and instead take the time to fully integrate the regularities of the language.
Why are we talking about it now?
This reform of past participles proposed by the International Council of the French Language in 2014 was presented last week by the AQPF to the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville.
“We submitted several solutions to him for improving written French,” explains Alexandra Pharand.
“What happened is that we shared the document that we had Mr. Drainville make, in which there was an example of updating the French language with past participles. It kind of snowballed, ”says, laughing, the one who has been making calls with journalists since yesterday.