Coping? Students in France Just Aren’t

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/world/europe/coping-students-in-france-just-arent.html

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PARIS — There is no easy translation or even a firm concept of the word “coping” in French, so when it turned up last week in a question on the national exam to earn a high school degree, it set off a fracas among the 350,000 or so students who took the test.

So far, about 12,000 of them have signed a petition posted four days ago on a social media site, change.org, arguing that the question was “too difficult.”

The word appeared in the English reading comprehension section of this year’s baccalaureate general exam, which requires an intermediate level of proficiency in two foreign languages.

The students said they were baffled by a passage from the best-selling novel “Atonement,” by Ian McEwan, in which the word “cope” appeared. Then came two questions about a character named Turner: “What concerns him about the situation?” and “How is Turner coping with the situation?”

Also puzzling for some was the word “concern.”

Students described the questions as “incomprehensible” and “impossible to answer,” and asked to meet with senior figures in the Education Ministry.

“Was the question grammatically correct?” asked a student named Théo. Another wrote: “Were there some words missing? If not, I didn’t understand it at all.”

Many other students, however, including even some who were flummoxed by the same questions, dismissed the complaints, saying the petition made French students look foolish.

“I didn’t get the question, but it happens,” said Clémence Siouffi, an 18-year-old at Lycée Jean-Pierre Vernant, near Paris.

“This petition is bothering me. We had already insulted Victor Hugo last year during the French baccalaureate, so it bothers me to be part of this generation that is only complaining and looking like idiots,” she said, referring to a controversy last year when students complained that a section asking them to analyze a Hugo poem, “Le Crépuscule,” was far too difficult.

The education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, quickly rejected the students’ pleas, saying: “In truth, I was quite surprised by the petition. Because ‘to cope with’ is part of the things one learns — and I am not fluent.”

But the students have their defenders. “This word ‘to cope’ is unusually hard to translate into French,” wrote Carol Just, a teacher of English in France, on the change.org website, “and the English notion is difficult to understand even for experienced adult learners because there is no real equivalent in the French language and in the French mind.”

Nenad Djokic, the country manager in France for EF Education First, an international language company that has schools teaching English in 50 countries, blamed the French educational system, which he said failed to give people enough of a chance to develop fluency. “Language training in France is done in classes of 30 students on average for 50 minutes three times a week,” he said.

“The teacher has to cover the grammar, the vocabulary and some speaking,” he added, “but how can you speak with 30 students one by one? You can’t, so the methodology is that the teacher does the speaking.”