According to a report by the Ministry of National Education on the spelling performance of CM2 pupils published on December 7, the spelling level of children has only been plunging for around thirty years. Students have lower levels of grammatical writing than their parents had, and they make twice as many mistakes as children 34 years ago.
The same dictation since 1987 to assess student performance
The Depp (the Direction of the evaluation, the prospective and the performance) dictates the same text since 1987 to a sample of pupils, to evaluate their capacities in spelling, and the average number of faults of a generation. The results of these dictations show that throughout these years, the level of spelling has dropped, without any respite. While in 1987, schoolchildren only made 11 errors on average, schoolchildren in 2021 unfortunately went up to 19 errors on average, almost double! According to the report, it is the grammatical spelling (rules of agreement between the subject and the verb, agreements in the nominal group, agreements of the past participle) which remains the main source of difficulties. The study also highlights recurring mistakes in words such as “right away” or “maybe”. The agreement of the adjective, as for the word “worried” only has 25.3% correct writes in 2021 while he had 46.2% success in 1987.
The denigration of traditional methods responsible for the drop in level?
On December 8, on CNews, journalist Charlotte d’Ornellas shed some light on the reasons that could explain this drastic drop in the level of students in spelling. She first recalled that “Students are not born dumber or worse at spelling today than they were 50 years ago” and that the origin of this drop in level must be sought in the “choices made at school” over the past decades. What are they ? “We have, one, the denigration of teaching methods, dictation in particular [mais aussi] the rejection of memorization, of repetition, of rote learning, which was judged by the famous pedagogues to be too simplistic. Result: if you don’t memorize, at some point, it doesn’t come by itself either”, she believes. Ms d’Ornellas adds that there has been a gradual drop in the number of hours spent “to French in general and to spelling in particular”: “At the beginning of the 20e century, there were 1,338 hours of lessons per year for students. Today, it is 864. We have lost a considerable number of hours and, moreover, we have multiplied the subjects taught. By force of circumstance, the level drops.” And the journalist points out the problem of the lowering of the level of requirement: “Then there is the question of leniency which has been involved. We see that the inspection bodies have quite regularly asked teachers to be lenient, that is to say less demanding in reality on the question. spelling.”
The level of aspiring school teachers in freefall
The results of the 2022 competition for the recruitment of school teachers have just been published: the correctors are warning about “lack of culture” candidates for “poor tongue” and faltering spelling. This is the harsh judgment issued by the jury of school teachers following the publication of the results of the competition validating the recruitment of primary school teachers.
“Triss few candidates cite sources that would demonstrate a personal culturecriticizes the report of the Academy of Lille. Some do it by mistaken’author, citing a reality TV show or Disney cartoons. A small minority are able to cite a few personal readings.” The proofreaders also deplore and “lack of command of the French language”relevant “a lot of’spelling errors, syntax errors and familiar expressionsisres”underlines the same report. “Punctuation is missing from some copies, commas, d’a wayisre general, are little usedes.”