Some news about learning to read and write is often distressing, to say the least. All the more distressing since knowing how to read and write plays an important and even crucial role in understanding texts, in reading a lot and enjoying it, in the ability to learn throughout life and to communicate… and we can guess the importance of all this for the exercise of citizenship.
Here, among many others, are some recent examples of this sad news.
Something to be sad about
This year, more than a quarter of students (26.8%) in 4e year failed the ministerial reading test, a severe drop compared to 2018, when 17.7% failed. COVID undoubtedly explains part of this disaster, but only part: in 2022, only 13.7% of students failed. In writing, the results are quite stable.
As is often the case, the failure rate (52% in 2023) for the written French exam of 5e secondary school worried, especially since the students could consult a dictionary, a grammar and a collection of conjugations. And at university, the French certification test written for teaching, the TECFEE, experienced significant failure rates when it was first administered. Note that we are talking here about future teachers — and what is more, people with around 14 years of schooling or more.
As for functional illiteracy in Quebec, we will find legitimate debates on this question relating to its meaning and its extent. But, regardless, there are reasons not to rejoice.
A possible solution is put forward from time to time and it has just been put forward again, this time by the EROFA research group: the spelling should be reformed.
Like many others before me, I have always had great discomfort with this proposal, and objections to it. They have been raised every time such a reform has been proposed. But above all, and this time again with others, I have suggestions to make to improve the learning of writing and reading.
Objections
I’ll take a long time, but let’s quickly go to a few essential points.
I think first of all that many spelling mistakes made – such as not putting an “s” in the plural – are much more basic than those we claim to correct and that we would benefit from working on learning how to correct them. .
I wonder how to justify certain new spellings closer to oral when oral changes so much from one place to another. To decide, it will be necessary to impose standards. But we already have some!
I think that invoking past transformations of spelling, certainly very real, is hardly convincing in this world of international and instantaneous communications between French speakers, and for which established standards are more necessary than ever.
And how will these new standards coexist with the old ones? I wonder, worried, if we will have to reissue the classics. What, for example, will our Reformed people do in front of Dumas’s books? They will need The three musketeersmaybe ?
Finally, I think that we are here, once again, in a dangerous tendency towards leveling down, accentuated by a context where the feeling (“It’s difficult! I don’t like it!”) takes precedence over the effort and work necessary for any learning. “I suffer therefore I am” then takes the place of “I strive to think, therefore I am”.
I could go on and on. But ultimately, with Patrick Moreau speaking on this same subject, I think “that by regularly proposing spelling reforms which are often full of interesting and intellectually stimulating proposals, reformers miss the problem real, which is rather to be found in the way in which spelling is taught”.
What to do, then?
Offers
Certainly, in learning the written and read language, there are factors over which the teacher unfortunately has no or very little control: the composition of the classes, the presence of students in difficulty or a greater or lesser linguistic or cultural diversity. But it has certain crucial levers to bring into play.
Being demanding is the first, and very important. Let’s not lower standards: let’s raise students up to them. Unsuspected pleasures await them.
Then, and this too is unavoidable, we should learn to read according to proven (syllabic) methods and apply them everywhere and systematically.
Finally, knowing that knowing how to read and being able to decode are not enough to read, understand and enjoy it – because for that you also need to master a very large part of the vocabulary on the subjects on which you read -, schools should transmit , progressively and in an orderly manner, in a carefully thought-out and detailed curriculum, this essential vocabulary. And this, in all areas in which we teach. And we should therefore be demanding about written and spoken French in all subjects.
By deploying all of this, the school can fully play its role and contribute, as it must, to preparing students to read a lot, to enjoy it, to develop the ability to learn throughout their lives and to dialogue clearly, orally and in writing, with others. Their fellow citizens.