French teachers want to dust off past participles

(Quebec) For those who still have cold sweats when it comes time to conjugate a past participle, French teachers have heard you. While the Legault government promises to review “in depth” the French programs in primary and secondary schools, they propose to teach a simplified version of past participles, rather than hammering in rules that have been fixed for centuries.

During the election campaign, the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) had promised to promote the teaching of French, which has since become a “government priority”. In January, the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, affirmed that “the status quo for the teaching of this subject [était] unacceptable”. He finally met last week with representatives of the Quebec Association of French Teachers (AQPF), who had a lot to say.

In interview with The PressAlexandra Pharand, vice-president of the Association and French teacher in 2^e secondary school, does not hide his exasperation with the time devoted to exceptions “and to the exceptions of exceptions” linked to the teaching of past participles.

According to M^me Pharand, the reform which is proposed – and which has still not been adopted – would make it possible to concentrate the efforts in class on the “regularities of the French language”, rather than on these “famous exceptions”

“When a student says to me: ‘Madam, I don’t understand why we tune it like that’, the only answer I give him is that people decided the rules 400 years ago. It’s hard to convince him that it’s relevant. Four hundred years later, I have to teach rules that are no longer relevant in 2023. It’s disconnected from their reality, ”she pleads.

The taste of reading

Faced with the decline of French and to be in line with the government’s desire to reverse this trend, the AQPF wants Quebec to flood the schools… with books!

“If you go to any French class, even in primary school, the books you find come out of the teachers’ pockets. In my class, I made a library by buying armchairs on Marketplace and sharing posts on social networks, where I wrote being in search of books. Teachers have to take time and money out of their pockets to stock their classes with books. It’s really a problem and it’s unacceptable,” explains Alexandra Pharand.

Just as a doctor would not be asked to buy his masks, the young teacher does not understand why teachers have to open their wallets to offer attractive books to their students, despite the investments made by Quebec to replenish school libraries. .

“It’s our work tool! Books are as essential for teachers as surgical instruments can be for a surgeon. The other glaring problem is that we often have old, obsolete books. A book that’s full of sticky paper, that we’ve patched together as best we can and in which we find the muffin crumbs left by someone who read it three years ago, that doesn’t give the taste of reading,” she says.

Write to write even better

To those nostalgic for dictations, the French teachers gathered within the AQPF have a message to convey: “There are much more innovative practices” for learning to write well, and they must be applied.

“The question I often ask people is, ‘Apart from school, when did you take dictation?’ Never. What is relevant is to put the students in writing situations that they will be able to reproduce outside of French class,” says Ms.^me Pharand.

By multiplying the contexts of writing and by providing opportunities for feedback, children can combine the pleasure of writing and doing it so that it is useful in their daily lives. ” It is practice makes perfect. So if we want our students to be good at writing, we have to make them write every day,” says Alexandra Pharand.

In their interview with Bernard Drainville, the French teachers also campaigned for Quebec to reduce the number of school stages from three to two.

“With three steps, we have to produce a report card within two months, even if we don’t yet know our students. Just put them back in the bath [des apprentissages] after the summer, it’s long. They have not yet returned from vacation that they are put in a situation of evaluation. The time they are in assessment is wasted time teaching. It’s really bad time management,” explained the AQPF to the Minister.

And to promote French among young people, the solution begins with “major investments in education and culture”, added the Association.

“Everything goes through the promotion of our language and our culture. If the government took the decision to invest by flooding our schools with books, Quebec literature, by taking our students more often to the theater, to see music and comedy shows, the students would end up taking an interest in it,” said assured Alexandra Pharand.