Published on
updated on
Reading 2 min.
During the last assessments on the French level of fourth grade students, a word, although common, seemed to escape their understanding. Proof that language is getting poorer?
Does your teenager always have something to say? But does he know the meaning of the words? While a middle school student has on average between 800 and 1,600 vocabulary words, recent assessments of the French level of fourth grade classes have revealed gaps. One word in particular left the middle school students speechless.
This word which posed a problem of understanding
On a test page (and which you will find in sources) more than 820,000 fourth grade students, from public and private establishments under contract, had to answer several questions on the meaning of words, written comprehension, mastery of language and oral comprehension. In a second part, the questions assessed the students’ level of mastery in lexical morphology and lexical semantics. “They could also ask for the linking of several vocabulary elements to identify a lexical field, or question the ability to recognize word families”indicates the Department of Evaluation, Foresight and Performance (Depp).
More than 9 out of 10 students (91.8%) correctly answered the question “ “Find the word from the same family as: ‘hope, despair, hope.'” among the answers: “space”, “spirit”, “species”, “hope”.
On the other hand, another question on the meaning of a word posed a problem to them: “If ‘hypotension’ means having lower than normal blood pressure. If a ‘thermometer’ is an instrument used to measure temperature. What does it mean to be hypothermia‘?”
The possible answers were: “That the temperature is higher than normal”, “That the thermometer is smaller than normal”, “That the temperature is lower than normal” And “That the blood pressure is lower than normal”. Only 54.5% of students, or a little more than one in two, responded that the third proposition was correct.
A third of 4th grade students perform poorly in French
According to the Depp which launched these evaluations, the observation is bitter: in 2023, upon entering fourth grade, approximately one student in three (32.4%) will be in the groups of students with the lowest performance in French, 38.5% in those of students with average performance and 29.0% in those of the best performing students.
The proportion of the most worrying group rises to more than 53% in the least advantaged colleges, compared to only 16% in advantaged colleges.
A difference also emerged between girls and boys, who performed less well. The trend, however, is reversed in mathematics.
Dead languages are no longer of interest
This lack of understanding could be linked to the average decline in reading, which impacts vocabulary, but not only that. According to the conclusions, disinterest in “dead languages” could also be to blame (the meaning of the word hypothermia could be deduced by its etymology). In 2021, only 13% of middle school students were still learning Latin, compared to 29% in 1990.
Slide: The 8 benefits of reading