Once again, French high school students have launched a petition to protest the content of the English test on the French BAC high school leaving exam. This time (2016) the problem is the use of the word Manhattan. The testers assumed that all students would know that it belongs in New York, but many did not, and felt that it was unfair to base their English language results on trivia known to some but not to others. The petition immediately gathered more than 12,000 signatures.
All this reminds me of last year's debate, when the petition (which gathered even more signatures) concerned questions that were also criticized as unclear, even to native English speakers (not that that matters, mind you).
I wrote about it at the time, but then didn't publish thinking "well, this will never happen again!"
Wrong.
So, only a year late, here's an essay on last year's petition against the English exam.
*** STUDENTS PROTEST UNCLEAR QUESTIONS ON ENGLISH TEST ***
How should France test English language skills?
This question usually pops up in France when the results of international evaluations of English skills are published, and France ranks near last, setting off a frenzy of self-flagellation mixed with patriotic pride (who needs English?)
But last week [2015], the shocker came from Change.org.
Furious at certain English questions on the bac, enterprising French high school students posted a petition which immediately received 10,000 signatures.
That’s a lot of anger about an English test. What set them off? This:
- Answer the following questions briefly and justify each time with a quote.
- What are three of his concerns about the situation?
- How is Turner coping with the situation?
Who the heck knows what “coping” means, the students said? It’s too hard! We don’t know this word. And if we don’t know the word, how can we know what’s being asked? And if we don’t know what’s being asked, how can we answer the question?
Oh stop being crybabies, other students responded. “Coping” is a perfectly normal English word. Deal with it! (another word for coping).
Curiously, none of the debate concerned the passage[1] – from Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement – that the students were actually being tested on. The outcry was all about understanding the question.
And on this point, there was a lot of confusion – and not just by students and their teachers.
In a much shared article about the protest, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent Kim Willsher wrote[2] that the contested question concerns “how a character copes with being accused of rape.” But this, according to the official correction[3], is wrong too! The character may be coping with that in the novel, but not, it seems, in the passage in question. So a British journalist does no better than a vocabulary-challenged French high school student? How did that happen?
If “coping” confuses many French students, “situation” has even native speakers scratching their heads. Which situation? The one described in the short excerpt (slogging through scenes of horror) – or the one alluded to throughout the novel (dealing with false accusation of rape)? What is being asked?
What does the jury expect? How does the jury want me to answer? How can I use my knowledge yet avoid an hors sujet?
Theoretically, years of French English classes should have prepared the students to answer this question. For, whether or not they learn English, they are supposed to learn how to take this test. And one of the rules they are supposed to learn is: restrict yourself to the text in question. Unless, of course, you actually read the entire novel, understood its subtleties and want to put it in context? Then one has a dilemma…
Are we testing English? Or something else?
***
“Teaching to the test” has been widely denounced in the USA. It is suspected that the fashion for linking students’ results to school accreditation and even teachers’ pay is leading many educators to invest more effort into drilling kids for a specific test than into actual learning. This is considered bad. Yet it is also logical - and hardly an exclusively American phenomenon.
In France, for example, the link between competitive exams for teachers (CAPES, Agrégation) and the prospect of lifelong employment, causes prospective teachers to invest enormous resources into learning how to pass the test for teachers, instead of into learning how to teach.
Thus, a person preparing for France’s highest exam for English teachers (agrégation d’anglais) invests incredible time and energy into mastering the art of writing, in seven hours, a brilliant dissertation – in French. How does that help the person to teach English? It doesn’t. Quite the contrary, in fact. But it is what the test requires so it is what the candidate must learn. The professors teach to the test, and if the test has nothing to do with English, well, whose fault is that?
***
Guessing what is being asked is not unique to English exams in France. In any subject, too original or too subtle and the dreadful “hors sujet” falls like a guillotine. English adds a level of anxiety to this game because the teachers – and often the correctors – tend to be French, not native English speakers. What does a French speaker of English think is correct? The difference is: certain daunting French exams (philo!) are specific to France; whereas English is a widely shared subject for which internationally recognized tests abound: TEFL, TOEFL, Cambridge. In Europe, there is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment,[1] ( CEFR or CEF), valid for all European countries. Yet, to evaluate students (and to select teachers), France uses not standard tests, recognized by universities and employers throughout the world, but its own, rather exceptional, English tests. Tests that, if the recent revolt has any meaning, too often confound, not just students, but native speakers.
If the purpose of an English exam is to evaluate (as many parents believe) the ability to communicate in English, then one measure of its relevance might theoretically be how well native speakers do on it. What does it mean if native speakers get it wrong? (Of course they get it wrong! They’re not properly prepared!) But then, might it not be inappropriate to ask, prepared for what?
What is the test really measuring? And why?
***
It is an open secret among parents of bilingual children in France – whispered amid hysterical laughter and incredulous rolling eyes – that to succeed in French English classes, their children must, like Harry Potter among the Muggles, hide their special powers. Never. Correct. Teacher.
This discretion extends to all things educational. Including, traditionally, the bac. A mother I know still trembles with rage when she recounts how, fifteen years ago, her daughter failed the bac because of an “hors sujet” in philo. What amazed me most about her story was not that her daughter, an outstanding student, had to repeat an entire year of school because a corrector had dismissed her effort as “off topic”. No, what amazed me was that my friend, who is a teacher, had never thought to contest the decision.
French teenagers study like mad for the bac. That is the best thing about it – for many, it’s when they learn. But, after ten years of studying English to be confronted with a question that is so poorly formulated that the test-taker can’t decipher what’s being asked? How to cope with that?
***
“Cope” has many meanings. One has to do with adapting. Dealing. Making do. For too long, students, like the soldier in Atonement who keeps his head down as he slogs through scenes of horror, have been coping. But coping is a survival mechanism, not a solution. Solutions come only when people organize to enact change.
In June of 2015, angry French high school students gathered over 10,000 signatures on a Change.org petition to protest the English exam on the bac. In doing this they jumped over all the institutional obstacles and took their complaint about the unfairness of an incomprehensible question directly to the world wide web. Students and teachers joined in, expressed support, criticism, more observations. Together they lifted the problem out of obscurity and demanded an answer. Why shouldn’t questions on an English exam be clear and unambiguous? Why shouldn’t they test what they are supposed to test?
What is the point, in fact, of specifically French English tests at all?
Why not simply switch, for teachers as well as students, to internationally recognized English tests for all?
______
Footnotes
[1] “Document C [The scene takes place during the Second World War.]The convoy had entered a bombed village, or perhaps the suburb of a small town – the place was rubble and it was impossible to tell. Who would care? Who could ever describe this confusion, and come up with the village names and the dates for the history books? And take the reasonable view and begin to assign the blame? No one would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture. The abandoned stores, equipment and vehicles made an avenue of scrap that spilled across their path. With this, and the bodies, they were forced to walk in the centre of the road. That did not matter because the convoy was no longer moving. Soldiers were climbing out of troop carriers and continuing on foot, stumbling over brick and roof tiles. The wounded were left in the lorries to wait. There was a greater press of bodies in a narrower space, greater irritation. Turner kept his head down and followed the man in front, protectively folded in his thoughts. 15ANV1ME1 Ian McEwan,Atonement,2001 »
[2] “French teens unable to 'cope with' baccalaureate English question” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/22/french-teens-unable-cope-with-baccalaureate-english-question
[3] M1. 3 concerns :
He is concerned about who would care about what happened in that village.« who would care ? »l. 2
He is concerned about how this disaster would be remembered : « describe this confusion...village names and dates for the history books » l. 2/3
He is concerned about when the blame would be assigned: « begin to assign the blame » l. 4
M2. He is trying not to pay attention to what he sees. « protectively folded in his thoughts » l. 11