“There are a lot of details related to spelling and grammar, so it is difficult to remember all these details in high school,” argues a fifth-year student. Almost every second candidate failed the spelling exam for the ministry in June last year. Worrying results, say experts who have noted difficulties in French among graduates since the mid-1980s.
However, according to the results of the June 2023 exam session, students generally performed better in the secondary 4 and 5 French exams than last year. But the devil is in the details. Of the five criteria evaluated, the last relates to compliance with standards of usage and grammatical spelling. This is the least well-mastered criterion, with results barely reaching a success rate of 55.6%.
Teachers make a bitter observation. “It is worrying to see that there are so many students who do not meet the spelling proficiency criterion for this exam,” comments Isabelle Plante, professor in the Didactics Department at UQAM. The students have completely failed, notes Élodie Bleyaert, a teacher in Outaouais.
Gap between public and private spheres
According to an average between the public network (50.9%) and the private network (70.8%), almost one in two students does not know how to spell. Some teachers regret the significant difference in assessment levels between the two networks: private schools are funded by the government, so technically public resources are lost where we need them, concludes Élodie Bleyaert.
We need to ensure that funding across the school network is ultimately equitable and that it is not just the wealthiest or most privileged in our society who are entitled to additional resources.
The phenomenon is not new. In 2007, only 43% of public school students passed the spelling portion of the exam. In the private sector the proportion was 65%. What explanation can be given?
“There is something that doesn’t fit, that doesn’t fit into our young people,” states Élodie Bleyaert bitterly. And yet we have made it our mission to teach them some grammar rules.
She says she has to repeat concepts that should have been learned earlier, a waste of time that prevents her from progressing in the school program. She regrets that students are admitted to secondary school 5 without the required level. Other ministerial reviews could be useful to better select candidates. Perhaps a child should be corrected by the Ministry of Education before entering secondary school, says Ms Bleyaert.
Another explanation for the failures in French: in the 1960s and 1970s, according to the teacher, the school focused more on spelling, whereas today the preferred skills concern critical thinking and reasoning. Spelling is also the second most important criterion for students. It is difficult for them to recognize the importance of writing well, says the teacher.
The pandemic, a pretext?
The pandemic led to the withdrawal of certain ministerial examinations, remembers didactics professor Isabelle Plante. The students may have been less well prepared and the return to normal assessments was somewhat abrupt, she says.
This is also the argument of the Ministry of Education. Let us not forget that from March 2020 to September 2022, Quebec students had to adapt and continue their school careers in conditions that were not always conducive to learning, the ministry responded in an email to Radio-Canada.
Although the pandemic is behind us, the resulting extraordinary effects remain, the ministry continues.
For Line Laplante, professor in the Department of Fundamental Learning in Literacy at UQAM, the pandemic has taken its toll and helped reinforce a phenomenon that was already present.
In her opinion, the exam results are so poor that they actually illustrate a problem in French teaching in Quebec.
The teacher explains that learning spelling does not begin in the 4th or 5th secondary school, but rather at the beginning of school, in the first year itself. [voire] in kindergarten, when we learn the names of letters, their sounds, when we try to write, in the beginning of learning to spell.
The phenomenon we are currently witnessing results from an accumulation of delays over the school years, which at a certain point become so obvious that we can no longer ignore them.
The Ministry of Education would rather build on this year’s good results. If we look at the overall pass rate for this test, it is 74.8%. That’s 5 percentage points higher than the June 2022 test, he replied in an email to Radio-Canada.
The four other criteria assessed in French concern “adaptation to the communication situation”, “coherence of the text”, “use of appropriate vocabulary” and “construction of appropriate sentences and punctuation”.
However, the Ministry of Education is concerned about this situation and assures [suivre] the situation up close. He recalls that last June he announced a strategy with several measures to improve French language skills, including the ongoing updating of the study program.
According to information from Elyse Allard