French lessons for middle school

A lot of children arrive at French having decided they are good at languages, because English came to them without much effort. Then French starts, the same child is suddenly behind, and nobody at home can work out why. Nothing has gone wrong with them. What is being asked of them changed. English was largely absorbed, and school mostly tidied up what was already in place. French has to be learned on purpose: every noun carries a gender, adjectives have to agree with it, and the verbs come in tables that genuinely have to be sat down with. A child who has never had to memorise anything in order to learn a language meets that at twelve or thirteen and reads it as failure. Here is the one piece of advice worth more than a term of lessons, and it costs nothing. Make sure they learn the gender with the noun from the very first week, never the word on its own. Not table but la table, every time, in the vocabulary list and out loud. Most of the trouble a fifteen year old has with French traces back to several hundred nouns learned without their article, and putting the gender back afterwards is slow joyless work that somebody ends up being paid for. What a tutor is actually for at this stage is unglamorous. It is short regular drilling of the things that simply have to be known, and someone to catch a mistake in the week it forms rather than in a test two months later. If your child is keeping pace and just finds French dull, lessons are unlikely to change that. Boredom with a subject is not a gap in it.