We Have Been Starting in the Wrong Place

A student asked me a question I was not prepared for. We were midway through a Year 9 unit on daily routines — the kind of unit that appears in every French textbook, in every year level, on every continent — and she looked up from her conjugation exercise and said: "Why are we learning this?"

She did not mean it rudely. She was genuinely asking. And sitting with that question later, I realised I could not give her a satisfying answer. Not because there wasn't one. But because the way I had been teaching French had not given her any reason to ask the question in the first place.

The sequence we inherited

Most secondary French programs in Australia follow a sequence that is so familiar it feels inevitable. We introduce a grammar structure. We drill it. We add vocabulary. We ask students to produce it in writing. Then we ask them to produce it in speech. At some point — often near the end of the unit, if there is time — we include something cultural. A French song, perhaps. A picture of the Eiffel Tower. A mention of baguettes.

Culture, in this model, is enrichment. It is the reward for finishing the grammar. It is what we do on a Friday afternoon when the serious work is done.

I taught this way for years. Not because I believed it was the best approach. But because it was the approach I had been taught, the approach the textbooks reflected, and the approach that felt safe and measurable.

What I heard in Fremantle

In May 2019, I attended a presentation by Gianfranco Conti at the TOFA conference in Fremantle. He spoke about the cognitive science of second language acquisition — about forgetting rates, about oral fluency, about the way the brain processes input before it can produce output. He made an argument I had heard in fragments before, but never so clearly: students need to hear language in meaningful context before they are asked to analyse or produce it. The brain does not acquire language by studying rules. It acquires language by encountering it, repeatedly, in contexts that carry meaning.

I drove home thinking about my Year 9 student. And I began to understand why she had asked that question.

We had given her grammar without meaning. We had asked her to conjugate verbs before she had any reason to care about the words those verbs expressed. We had started with the mechanism and withheld the purpose.

The Francophone world we were not teaching

There is another dimension to this problem that I think about often.

According to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, there are 396 million French speakers in the world today. Sixty-five per cent of them live in Africa. The fastest-growing Francophone populations are in West and Central Africa — not in France, not in Québec, not in the Pacific islands we occasionally mention in passing.

And yet, in most Australian French classrooms, we teach France. We teach Paris. We teach the Eiffel Tower and the baguette and the café au lait. We teach a version of the French-speaking world that represents perhaps a quarter of its actual population and a fraction of its cultural richness.

I have been teaching French for twenty-six years — across the United Kingdom and Australia. And for much of that time, I taught France. It took me longer than I would like to admit to recognise that I was teaching a map with most of the territory missing.

When culture came first

About fifteen years ago, I began a project in my classroom that I did not yet have a name for. I started bringing Francophone cooking into my units — not as a novelty, not as a Friday afternoon activity, but as the entry point into language and culture. My students cooked dishes from across the Francophone world and researched the countries, the traditions, the languages within languages, the histories that those dishes carried.

Something happened in those classrooms that I had not seen when I started with grammar. Students asked questions I had not anticipated. They made connections I had not planned for. They began to understand that French was not the property of France — that it belonged to a world that was vast, diverse, and genuinely interesting.

One year, a Year 8 class spent several weeks on Madagascar. They cooked romazava — a traditional meat and greens stew — and mofo gasy, small rice flour cakes that are eaten for breakfast across the island. The food was the entry point. The culture was the entry point. The language followed — not because I had drilled it, but because students had a reason to want it.

The magic simply does not operate when we begin with grammar. It begins when students encounter something real — something that makes them want to speak.

A different sequence

What I have come to understand — through two and a half decades in the classroom, through the cognitive science I encountered at that Fremantle conference, through the students who asked me why they were learning French — is that the sequence matters enormously.

When we begin with culture, we give students a reason to learn the language. When we then move to listening — to hearing the language in its authentic Francophone context — we build the phonological and lexical foundations that make grammar instruction actually land. When we consolidate through purposeful, meaningful repetition, we move language from recognition to automatic recall. When we teach grammar in the context of writing that students are already attempting, the instruction feels like a revelation rather than a preliminary exercise. When we move language into real spoken interaction, students find that they have something to say — and the confidence to say it. And when we ask for final expression, students arrive at that moment prepared, not scrambling.

This is the sequence I have been refining for years. I now call it CERCLE™ — Culture, Écoute, Rythme, Construction, Langue, Expression. It is not a collection of activities. It is a cycle. Every unit follows it. Every phase builds on the one before.

The student who asked why

I think about that Year 9 student often. Her question — why are we learning this? — was not a complaint. It was a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. She had been given a mechanism without a purpose, a tool without a context, a language without a world.

The honest answer to her question, if I had been able to give it then, would have been this: I don't know yet how to make you care about this. But I am learning.

I am still learning. But I am more certain than ever that we have been starting in the wrong place — and that starting somewhere different changes everything.