Learn English at all ages! - interview with Marie-Anne Gosse (Les Petits Bilingues)

Today we know that mastering languages, and English in particular, is essential. What is less obvious is when to start, how to progress or get back on track when the English course has left us behind...

So we went to meet Marie-Anne Gosse who runs two of the training centers of the Les Petits Bilingues group, the leading national English learning network in France. With their 54 centers, Les Petits Bilingues are aimed at all members of the family and professionals in business.

From Marne-la-Vallée, Marie-Anne gives us advice on how to improve our English and how to use games as an effective learning tool.

In France, we tend to be good at written English, but it's pretty disastrous when speaking. What do you think is the reason for this?

Marie-Anne Gosse: Unlike some countries, in France, we start English very late in school. It's supposed to start in primary school, but it varies greatly from one year to the next. There are teachers who aren't trained in English and for whom it's difficult to transmit concepts in this subject. When children reach ^{6th grade} , they are (pre)adolescents and at that age, it's either a success or a failure.

I think there should be more fun classes, even for teenagers. When I talk with our facilitators who are native speakers or of Anglo-Saxon culture / dual nationality, I realize that the English, for example, spend much less time on grammar and conjugation. In France, we get attached to it very early, even before being in the "speaking" mode. Children should almost learn English orally before writing it.

Maybe we also try too hard to teach the same thing, to everyone and at the same time. We move forward together and if there are some who are lagging behind, too bad. At school, language groups often reach 20-30 students. At Les Petits Bilingues, we create small groups, so we can see if someone is dropping out or hasn't understood what we're doing. We can go see them and re-explain the rules of the game if necessary.

What teaching methods are used at Les Petits Bilingues?

We focus on play, sharing and helping each other. Our facilitators teach things to the children, who also teach each other things. We often see that children who have been registered with Les Petits Bilingues for a few years will help the newcomers, in a "win-win" relationship. The child shows what he can do and explains it to his friend. And the latter is reassured because it is a child his age who is helping him.

Furthermore, you should know that there are 10 multiple intelligences. Each child has several intelligences to their credit. Let's imagine that a child learns more through movement, in this case we will do yoga and games so that he can learn vocabulary through kinesthetics. We can have children who are visual, so they need to read the word to remember it or others have a musical ear and they learn better through music.

We try to offer lots of different activities so that each child, whatever their intelligence, can grasp the vocabulary and understand what is happening. If we stick to just one intelligence (for example, musical intelligence, with songs), there are children who will not be able to follow because it does not speak to them. These days, children are very alert, from a very young age. So we have to quickly find a way to communicate with them. We can't put them all in a mold. It doesn't work.

At Les Petits Bilingues, we also want to broaden our horizons. By asking ourselves what I can learn through English: it could be math, counting, discovering countries... This year, in our center, we will take a world tour of English-speaking places on the theme of water: from Hawaii to Vancouver, via Ireland, New Zealand, etc. The children will be able to discover that people surf in Hawaii, what animals live there, what the locals wear... It allows the children to think that elsewhere on the globe, we live differently, we have another culture and we speak English too.

For us, it is important that children come with pleasure. At Les Petits Bilingues , the work of the teaching team will allow the child to progress in his group. Of course, this will be coupled with the child's investment. If he doesn't want to be there, we may be the best in the world, nothing will happen. But in fact our entire method is there precisely to make him want to and encourage him with our positive teaching. And the ^3rd part of the equation is the parents. If the parents accompany the child by saying "That's great, you're going to go to your English group. You'll explain to me what you did and we'll see him again at home". The child will be motivated. He will be enthusiastic about going there and telling his parents what he did. If it is approached as a completely secondary activity by saying: "You go to your English workshop, I'll drop you off and pick you up in an hour" and it stops there. The child's desire will not be nourished. The family and the entourage are important in the process.

How do your English workshops work in practice?

We have annual packages and courses for children from 1 to 18 years old. With the little ones (1 to 3 years old), in the "first steps" workshops , where children who are not yet in school come with one of their parents, we use a lot of games and songs. For example, we simulate a picnic and there by touching the objects the child integrates the vocabulary more easily. The children are really immersed, take part in the activities and are not just spectators of an activity taking place before their eyes.

Children of all ages can come once a week, in a group with their friends, in their center. For children up to 6 years old, we do not have writing. We are exclusively based on speaking, with activities, games like flashcards , or songs... We put everything in place in relation to the theme we are addressing that day to help them discover vocabulary. Afterwards , from CE1-CE2 , we will allow children to start writing.

And we have 3-hour immersion workshops . These workshops integrate the previous 1-hour program, to which we add other experiences, such as screenless coding. Children will discover how to control a wooden robot through programming. They will play games related to this and thus learn through movement. Or they will discover, through a dedicated activity, the different sources of electricity: wind, sun, etc. where they build wooden models with LEDs to see how it works. And of course we use Topla games every time: mats, card games , flashcards , Top Detective or Explorer , memos . The fun aspect is really anchored in our workshops.

For professionals , we have individual tailor-made training. Each person has their own training account with a certain budget and we can offer them different packages of 10 hours or 40 hours for example , all eligible for MonCompteFormation . As the person is face to face with a teacher, we will go straight to the essentials concerning their needs in English, without reviewing points that would be useless to them. For example, a person called me recently telling me that she is going to work for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. She wants to improve her English because she lacks sports vocabulary. We will be able to teach her what she needs, so that she is able to express herself, hold meetings and give presentations fluently in English.

If you want to continue learning English at home, what works best?

If we want languages ​​to be learned well, it must be a daily occurrence: watch cartoons and films in English, listen to songs, learn a few words every day, play games if possible in English at home, try to surround yourself with people who speak English to practice...

And for teens who are on social media, it could be setting these networks in English on the phone, watching Netflix with subtitles, subscribing to podcasts. There are a lot of podcasts with stories in English, puzzles or that relate historical facts.

When you are a young adult, you can go and work abroad as an au pair in a family. I did it for 2 months during the summer, in England, it brought me a lot.

Pen pals can also work well. I found a group on Facebook for kids to send letters to each other, and my daughter now has a pen pal in the United States. It’s a written exchange, but it could very well be a video call on Zoom.

You also have English-language childcare which is an interesting system, as we do at Les Petits Bilingues with the Nanny agency offer. You have a nanny who looks after your children in the evenings or on Wednesdays. So your child does not need to go abroad (which has been made complicated by Covid) to hear English. He speaks it every day with the nanny.

And obviously our structures, Les Petits Bilingues are there to compensate for the lack of English that there may be in the family and the children's entourage, and the fact that we have traveled less abroad in the last 2 years.

To find all the offers from Petits Bilingues, click here