Mistakes, declining academic standards, and educational reforms are all sensitive topics in France—and, according to the survey’s findings, subjects of heated debate. The media loves to cover them, and everyone finds themselves in a complex relationship with these issues, one marked by both attachment and frustration, certainty and insecurity. The internet is teeming with tips, tricks, advice, tools, and techniques for improving one’s academic performance, and apps are popping up everywhere. Memorize vocabulary lists? Do endless dictations? Learn the rules? Finding solutions first requires identifying the problem.
The study by Danièle Manesse and Danièle Cogis, published in the 2000s, reinforced the idea that academic standards are declining: conducted among some 3,000 fifth-grade students, it found that “the gap between the results of students in 1987 and those in 2005 averages two grade levels.” Fifth-graders in 2005 made the same number of mistakes as fifth-graders did twenty years ago. Ninth-graders in 2005 made the same number of mistakes as fifth-graders did in 1987.”
In 1987, 50% of students made fewer than six mistakes. By 2005, that figure had dropped to 22%. The same text—about ten lines long—was dictated to fifth-grade students again in 2015. Students made an average of 17.8 errors in 2015, compared to 14.3 in 2007 and 10.6 in 1987. The decline in performance is widespread and does not affect only certain students; the gap between the strongest and weakest students has also widened. The main areas of difficulty are grammatical spelling: agreement between subject and verb—for example, the -nt ending in thethird-person plural—as well as number markers on nouns and adjectives, and the past participle.
Spelling difficulties persist even at advanced levels, and two main factors emerge to explain this: the intrinsic complexity of the French spelling system and the way that system is taught. French spelling is one of the least transparent. Our writing system is alphabetic—that is, it encodes sounds—but it is far from operating on the principle of one letter per sound and one sound per letter.
In this regard, English spelling is even more complex (for example, the sound [i] can be spelled in several ways, and the letters “ough” are pronounced differently depending on the word). It is simpler when it comes to grammatical markers (gender, number, verb person, etc.), which are rare in English and often audible. In French, the difficulties center on silent letters, particularly at the end of words: “il chante” and “ils chantent” are pronounced identically, but in writing, the plural is marked twice—on the personal pronoun “il” and on the verb ending. “Mangez” could be written as “mengez,” “manjez,” “mangé,” “manger,” etc.; these would be phonetically correct but not orthographically correct.
French spelling requires a deep understanding of grammar—those rules we can sometimes recite by heart without actually applying them: “The past participle conjugated with the auxiliary verb *avoir* agrees with the direct object (COD) when it is placed before the verb.” Even in spoken French, in contexts where this agreement would be audible, it is often omitted. Example: “La tête qu’il a fait!” rather than “La tête qu’il a faite.” And this is true even among speakers who carefully control their speech, such as on the radio or at conferences.
Dictation is a way to assess students’ progress, but this raises the following question: Do the skills tested in dictation correspond to the spelling skills actually used when writing a text? Knowing how to spell is a procedural skill; in other words, declarative (or theoretical) knowledge plays a role, but it is not enough. This is especially true since students internalize pseudo-rules that lead to errors: “You need an ‘e’ for the feminine form, so I wrote ‘ée’ because I’m a girl.”
To study spelling skills in real-world writing situations, it is therefore important to use texts written by students rather than dictations. It was with this in mind that the corpus serving as the basis for the ANR E-Calm project was compiled. By comparing multiple versions of students’ texts, we can also see what they tend to correct—or where new errors occur.
Finally, this corpus is supplemented by interviews with the writers about their texts in order to better understand how they work; a key issue here is the degree of control exercised during the writing process: either the writer faces difficulties managing the writing process but is able to identify and correct an error, or they are unable to analyze it.
Another important question is which areas of spelling the dictation text allows for testing. In general, the level of difficulty remains largely intuitive (text length, words considered difficult, etc.). Dictation competitions are full of subtleties (rare vocabulary, rarely used verb tenses). In school, points are deducted—but for what, exactly? A jumble of issues is thrown together: double letters, agreement, verb conjugations, and so on.
A dictation often ends up testing general spelling rather than specific issues that have been carefully selected based on the students’ level and the characteristics of the written language. Researchers in spelling pedagogy emphasize the importanceof identifying required skills—that is, the actual needs of writers and what should be expected of them within the framework of a progressive, step-by-step learning process.
To teach spelling effectively, the current approach is therefore to focus on specific objectives, practice the procedures, and explain the reasoning behind those procedures. Rather than saying, “You must agree in gender and number,” we work separately on marking number within the noun phrase (determiner, noun, adjective) and address gender marking separately (many adjectives do not vary by gender).
We analyze statements to figure out how things work, and we write on a daily basis while discussing the choices we make to highlight how we go about it. This is the case with the Twictée platform, which allows students to work according to these principles: students collaborate and negotiate their spelling choices through the messages they write, while becoming familiar with social media conventions.
Learning to spell is a long process, and recognizing this is important to help students take ownership of this skill rather than fostering the feeling that their own language will always elude them. Currently, universities are introducing writing courses, driven in particular by the ANR UOH Ecri+ project . First, it is important to remember that spelling alone is not enough and that producing well-crafted texts requires knowing how to ensure their coherence, write using sources, and construct arguments.
When it comes to spelling, we need to question the methods currently in use: Does it make sense to repeat what has been done before simply because—but also even though—it didn’t work? We must focus on what we truly and primarily need to write correctly, and on how writers actually go about it when they are writing.
