I recently had a language learning epiphany. It was when my francophone 2 year-old reported "
j'ai allé dehors" when telling me about her day in daycare. It grates less when your progeny commits this grammatical faux pas, but it nonetheless caused a reflexive cringe when I heard it leave her mouth.
The minor cringe was short lived, however. It quickly occurred to me why this was a clear marker that my girl is developing well in one of her family's two languages.
Here are three reasons why hearing
j'ai allé in your classroom is awesome.
1. Your students are choosing to speak French
If you hear something like the
franglais phrase in the title of this blog post, it means your student
wants to speak in as much French as they know. Despite the risk of sounding silly and failing in front of others, your student has chosen to use French!
The worst thing you could do after this behaviour is respond with a nitpick about mis-conjugation. Celebrate your student's communicative success, courage and grit!
2. Your students understand grammar
It
makes sense to use the verb
avoir to form the passé composé of the verb
aller in the 1st person. In saying it, your student is proving they have a grasp of the pattern of speaking in the tense. Grammatical rules are at their core illogical and arbitrarily set parameters developed by flawed humans. Rules surrounding gender and tense in many European languages come from a time when we thought the earth was flat.
J'ai allé is the one with the problem. Your student is thinking and #winning.
3. Your students are #winning
As you learn about the CEFR and the DELF, you will come to realize that proficiency in your new language is entirely about "
respecter la consigne". The core question of the DELF is: "
can you do this in French?". If your goal is to be able to handle a simple purchase in French, for example, the true test of your proficiency is, start to finish, in French, buying something (it's not about conjugating
acheter).
My adorable toddler's communicative task was to report to me what she did at la garderie. She succeeded 100% in that task using
j'ai allé on top of a few other effective French words.
Grammar is not inconsequential; but, in the big picture, understanding how grammar works is a small component of being proficient in using the language. Exploring my feelings about
j'ai allé helped me rediscover this essential truth in our trade as teachers and ambassadors of the French language.
Want to share your own j'ai allé story? Comment below! I'd love to hear more from my FSL colleagues, and maybe learn something new!
