Letter from Paris: The French government has declared the teaching of English a national priority. Most French school children study English for 10 years, yet few can speak it, and France continues to trail behind other EU countries in English-language performance, writes Lara Marlowe.
So why can't the French speak English? Laurel Zuckerman, an American-born author who has lived for 24 years in France, says the country wastes millions of euro and man hours on a competitive selection system for teachers that predates the French revolution and ignores the two most obvious requirements: that teachers know how to teach, and that they speak English.
Zuckerman holds degrees from the University of Arizona and the French business school HEC. She lost her hi-tech job when the dotcom bubble burst, and embarked on a failed odyssey to become an English teacher.
Some 100,000 people spend a year preparing for the CAPES and agrégationexams annually, in the hope of qualifying to teach English in a French collège(middle school) or lycée(public secondary school). "Ninety per cent of them fail," notes Zuckerman. "It's a gigantic, destructive machine. Many people sit the exam over and over, because if you pass, it's like the holy grail. You're a civil servant for life."
The agrégationwas established by Louis XV in 1766, after he banned the Jesuit order and needed to replace priests as teachers.
The bureaucracy burgeoned, and today it is possible to become an agrégéin 37 subjects, one of which is English.
On the first day of the preparatory course at the Sorbonne, Zuckerman told the professor she was a native English-speaker and might not need the language laboratory. "You definitely will," the professor replied. "We are going to restore English texts into French - and not just any French - the impeccable French of the educated elite."
Zuckerman began taking the notes that became her first book, Sorbonne Confidential, published by Fayard last year. "It was immensely bizarre," she recalls. "The first exam, in April, was a seven-hour, hand-written dissertation in French. It had to be the classic Cartesian combination of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis."
Would-be agrégéswere also required to write a problématiqueon English grammar - in French - and conform to Longman's Dictionary of Pronunciation.
One reason the French find it so difficult to speak English is that their teachers neglect everyday language, because competitive exams concentrate on obscure vocabulary, Zuckerman says.
A fellow student passed the exam and embarked on her trial year as an English teacher. An inspector scolded the new recruit for referring to three ducks in class. "Duck are like fish, they take no 's' in plural," the inspector insisted.
"Duck are like fish" became a chapter heading in Zuckerman's book.
Before Christmas, Zuckerman was received at the French education ministry and senate. The adviser and senator she met were both agrégés. "You are dealing with deeply embedded corporatism," she says.
"You could not throw a stone without hitting an agrégéin these places. They're a self-replicating caste who recognise each other by their mastery of French, by the exaggerated elegance with which they speak." The senator drafted a report on the teaching of foreign languages, and just lost a battle against a law that authorises patent applications in French, English or German.
"He said: 'For the first time, we've allowed someone to create a legal document in France in a foreign language'." The senator's office was filled with magazines about La Francophonie, the loose association of French-speaking nations that seeks to rival the British Commonwealth.
"Ultimately, the biggest obstacle to any serious action was the fear that if the French spoke English well, it would authorise inhabitants of former colonies in Africa to abandon French for English," Zuckerman concluded. "Both men told me, 'If French children learn to speak English, what will the Africans do?'" Zuckerman believes the French are secretly torn "between learning English and saving La Francophonie, which they see as an expression of French power".
If they are serious about improving their English, they must recruit and train teachers differently. "They have to care about people really learning the language, as opposed to going through the motions," she adds.
The recruiting system for English teachers is the sort of hidebound tradition that President Sarkozy says he wants to reform. But he may have conflicting feelings about the language of Shakespeare. Before he went to law school, Sarkozy was rejected by the Institut des Sciences Politiques because he failed the English exam.
Now Sarkozy wants France 24, the international television channel launched by his predecessor, to stop broadcasting in Arabic and English, a decision denounced as "the arrogant pusillanimity of a France that speaks only to expatriate elites" by unions at France 24. The foreign minister Bernard Kouchner explained that Sarkozy believes it is futile to attempt to compete with CNN, al-Jazeera or the BBC in English.