No, no, no, no! The real question is, “Is our children learning?”
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Or maybe not? Kernels of truth, and all that… When I was in high-school, the French teacher was well known for having the most astounding décolletage.
You’re lucky. Ours was a nonce.
Isn’t that illegal in Quebec?
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Châteauguay is possibly the largest English-as-a-first-language town in Montérégie (maybe Westmount on the Isle or some of the border towns could be more anglophone).
Anyhow, this specific, “alternative” French class is about the equivalent of an ESL class in Texas near the Mexico border - these students are not native speakers, nor are they necessarily surrounded by daily language immersion. They need a qualified teacher just like the US requires qualified ESL teachers. Rosetta Stone is fine if you need to carry a basic conversation, but it wasn’t so useful (IMO) in the written/grammar skills.
Québec also requires 100 hours of French instruction and passing a test if you plan to do anything more than a high-school education: after 11th grade, Québec students go on to a sort of post-high school/pre-college program run by colleges (which can then be done fully in English if the students choose).
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Once upon a time I was looking at jobs in Montreal. Came to the conclusion that my very rusty French (20 years of atrophy, wasn’t that good to start with) was going to be a significant handicap with that…
I suspect it varies wildly but for the languages I’ve looked at it for, the ratings are abysmal. I have easier access to better ways of learning French, Spanish (both Americas Spanish and at least one of the Spain varieties), etc. so I haven’t checked the reviews for those.
That was better than a Rick Roll. Also, I hate you (not really).
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That is surprisingly low. Even I had more than that in school as my third foreign language and I don’t remember a thing.
I realize that it is different if you live in a majority French-speaking environment, but still I would have expected it to be a much higher priority.
Or is that a highly atypical worst case?
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I’ve lived in Montreal with very below-fluent French. It’s actually not that much of a problem because nearly everyone in Montreal is bilingual French/English (and even have a weird habit of switching languages mid sentence). It’s much more of a problem in Quebec City or the Quebec countryside because there a lot of people are monolingual Francophones.
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I’m guessing that it’s really quite horrible french. Not quite lifted straight from google translate, but close.
That wasn’t what Dubya said. He said the real question is “Are children learning?” He’s said many many dumb and evil things over the years, but that one actually wasn’t one of them.
Mine got loads better after I binge watched Spiral (which is fucking excellent TV, if you haven’t seen it. As is Braquo, which is like The Shield, kinda, but much more nihilistically French. I love them both). Its surprising how much you remember when your brain gets a bit of a poke.
Yeah, my french is extremely limited but I was pretty sure you’d popped it into Google Translate (doesn’t look quite natural. Which is what I did to translate it because I recognized almost none of it.
It was supposed to be:
The École Normale Supérieure hates this one neat trick.
At least one language school (Berlitz, perhaps?) was advertising its wares this way. It’s been a while since I’ve seen those ads.
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If a language teacher cannot outperform the success of self-study using Rosetta Stone by a measurable factor of three or more, that he or she is not qualified.
A language instructor has to perform the following tasks which cannot be performed by a computer:
- Correct mistakes. No, not I-clicked-the-wrong-button mistakes. Pronunciation mistakes. Grammar mistakes.
- Answer questions.
- Talk to people. After a few months of language instruction, students should have reached a level where they can move beyond fill-in-the-blanks and translation exercises and say what they want to say. A human teacher is necessary to give feedback on this.
- Keep people motivated/on their toes. A good language class is exhausting and doesn’t allow you to stare out the window.
Number 4 can be performed by any teacher, even if that teacher doesn’t speak a single word of French. The rest, not so much.
It’s quite a well known fact that the quality of language instruction varies hugely. Some teachers are “qualified” on paper only. Did you ever have a qualified teacher? The idea that you consider it possible that Rosetta Stone might actually work better suggests that you didn’t…
Indeed. But you’ve just outsourced the job of the teacher, to the various “remote” native speakers and to whoever does the job of motivating the students and coordinating the various disparate sources of material.
The task of figuring out what vocabulary to put into Anki next, what writing exercises to do and what conversation topics to focus on in your next Skype session probably shouldn’t be left to a bored 10-year-old who’d rather be out playing soccer.
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Ah, hem. First off, I gave no attribution. But since you waded in anyways, here is the full quote
“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” — Florence, South Carolina; January 11, 2000
Edit. This might be the actual full quote: “What’s not fine is rarely is the question asked, are, is our children learning?” [from Snopes.com] which is still a pretty garbled sentence.
They should save themselves some money and use duolingo.
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Oh, I forgot to mention frequency dictionaries. There’s the choice of vocab done. The 1000 most common words account for around 75% of any text you’re likely to encounter in most languages.
I agree that a good teacher is a great thing. But I actually think that a pupil with a good teacher will still do better if they use things like anki, frequency dictionaries, skype conversations, lang-8 and things like that.
