Two very different needs, often confused
Families ask for “French lessons” in two quite distinct situations, and giving the wrong one wastes a term.
French as a second language
Your family has recently arrived in Monaco. Your child may be at an English-language school and needs French for daily life, or may have been placed in the French system and needs the language urgently in order to access every other subject. The goal is comprehension and confidence, fast.
School French, French curriculum
Your child has been in the French system for years and speaks fluently, but struggles with the subject itself: text commentary, the dissertation, grammar, and the oral of the baccalauréat de français in première. Fluency is not the issue; method is.
If you have just arrived in Monaco
When a child is dropped into a French-language classroom, the instinct is to book tutoring in the subject where marks are worst — often maths. That is usually the wrong first move. If the child cannot follow the instructions, the maths tutoring is treating a symptom.
We would normally suggest starting with intensive French for comprehension: the classroom language, the vocabulary of instructions and assessments, and enough grammar to make written work possible. Subject tutoring follows once the language is no longer the bottleneck. Paul, a native speaker of both French and English, can conduct these lessons in English where that helps.
This sequencing matters more than the number of hours booked, and we will say so even when it means recommending fewer lessons at the start.
If your child follows the French curriculum
School French is a method subject as much as a language subject. The work divides into a few identifiable skills.
- Reading a text closely. Noticing what the text does, not only what it says: the effect of a tense, a repetition, a shift in register.
- Structuring an answer. The French school essay has an expected architecture, and marks are awarded for it. It can be taught explicitly.
- Writing accurately. Agreement, tenses and punctuation, corrected on the student’s own work rather than through decontextualised exercises.
- Preparing the oral. For the épreuve anticipée de français, presenting a text and answering an examiner’s questions is a rehearsable skill.
Working between two languages
Several of our tutors move between French and English daily, and that matters for a child who thinks in one language and is assessed in the other. A structure that is natural in English — the topic sentence, the direct thesis statement up front — is not what a French examiner expects, and vice versa. Making those differences explicit removes a whole class of lost marks.
