The French curriculum in 6e
Even though the 6e class still belongs to cycle 3 (along with CM1 and CM2), starting collège brings more hours devoted to science & technology and history-geography, not to mention modern languages, which have the same number of hours as mathematics — namely 4h per week. Of course, French lessons continue and take up 5 hours in the timetable of a 6e student…
French in detail
Building on the teaching begun in CM1 and CM2, the 6e French curriculum is organised around 4 key areas:
- Spoken language: expressing oneself clearly, listening to and respecting others’ speech, recounting an experience…
- Reading: studying works related to antiquity, tales and stories, poetry and drama, working on image analysis
- Writing: developing the enjoyment of writing, producing a coherent and complete text, mastering narration and beginning to learn description.
- Language study: deepening grammar (analysing sentences, word classes, grammatical functions, verb conjugation and tense meanings), spelling (agreement, plurals, punctuation, auxiliary signs, accentuation, homonyms…) and vocabulary (synonymy, antonymy, paronymy, literal/figurative meaning, lexical fields…).
End-of-year expectations for 6e in French
By the end of the 6e year, a student must, orally, be able to listen to, summarise and rephrase information heard, take a critical view of it, but also give oral presentations, spontaneously speak up to express their ideas and connect them to those of others, while being able to self-assess in order to improve.
In reading and understanding written text, they must read a text of 15 to 20 lines aloud at an average of 130 words per minute, understand a literary text or an image and engage with it. In writing, copy a text fluently, use writing as a tool for thinking and learning, and develop their texts while taking written-language conventions into account.
In terms of language study, a 6e student in French must distinguish homophones in context, identify the components of a simple sentence, master the properties of the subject complement, agreement of the past participle used with être, identify the tense markers for the present conditional and present imperative, and connect words together (lexical fields and word families).
To find out more about the end-of-6e expectations in French, click here!
