DELF Unpacked: Don’t Ever Lose Faith

Natasha here, reporting in on the aftermath of the infamous DELF B2.

I was worried.  Let’s find some better descriptors, now that I’m functioning in my mother tongue.  Words like chagrined, nausea-ridden, paralyzed.  I dreaded that exam.  My entire body was stiff with tension for eight solid weeks, from the moment I walked into my first class to the day after the inquisition.  My long-awaited summer in France turned out to be, in many ways, a summer of travail and trepidation.

And then, just like that, I passed.  Not just by the skin of my teeth.  Not just with a satisfactory margin of breathing room. Not quite with the flying colours I secretly dreamed of.  But almost.  Almost.

At one point, I re-coined the DELF acronym (“Diplome d’Etudes en Langue Française”) as “Dumb, Enigmatic Lists of Faults.”  I still kind of think that.  The test-makers are simply méchants, in my well-studied opinion.  They rub their hands in delight as they formulate one trick question after another, in a sinister attempt to separate the dumb from the dumber.  I know.  I met one of them.  And she was mean.

But do you know what it was that bumped my score down two points from the 80% I’d hoped for?  It wasn’t the asinine trick questions.  It wasn’t the ominous oral exposé.  It was, of all things, the “Production Écrite”! I, who feel a sense of authorship in my very bones — I, who ooze with words — I, who blog in French (!) — I bombed out on the test of written expression!

How could this be? Well, I haven’t actually seen the corrections yet, but I have a guess.  The Production Écrite was the third of three back-to-back exams, written sans pause in a room that smelled of fear, with a wall-sized timer looming before me, ticking away the seconds until my doom.

I may write well, but I don’t write fast.  And I like to have a good thesaurus by my side.  I had spent too long puzzling over the stupid trick questions on the previous two exams, and I was rushing to make up time on the home stretch.  A few extra minutes, and a few deep breaths, would have given me the two precious points I craved.  A dictionary and an extra half hour would have propelled me to a solid 85%. I had to spend my final moments counting words, one by one, instead of re-reading the words themselves.  I simply did not have enough time to think.  And thinking is my specialty!

I now sympathize, for the first (well, maybe second) time in my life, with test anxiety.  I understand why we, as teachers, give our students time to think. I’ve always been conscious of this from a pedagogical standpoint; but now I know what it feels like for a student (especially a student functioning in a foreign language) to underachieve for stupid reasons, like the ticking of a clock.

And so there is Lesson #1 from the DELF B2: Empathize.  Believe in the abilities that are not yet fully evident.  Time should be a friend, not a menace.

Lesson #2 is a little more positive.  Much more positive, in fact.  Glowingly positive.

I honestly —honestly— worried that I would fail the exam on account of the “Production Orale.”  I like making words with a pencil.  I do not like making words with my mouth.  There is even less “think time” when one is speaking than when one is writing.  One must think about every single word, one at a time, and one cannot erase, reword, or re-think.  What comes out, stays out; and what doesn’t come out at all produces agonizing, panic-ridden, deer-in-the-headlights silences.  I hatethose silences.  I feel like an idiotduring those silences. And I am not an idiot.

In the weeks leading up to the exam, I pored over the grading rubric, hoping that I could make up for my oral incompetence with my written strengths.  “If I can just pull off a 5/25 on the oral test, I might have a chance,” I thought.  Seriously. I was doing that kind of math.

And do you know what? I pulled off a whopping 21.5. Seriously.  It was jaw-dropping.  It compensated for my written gaffs.  It taught me Lesson #2: There is power in friendship.

You see, I had a friend in France.  We spoke together in French for several hours, every single day, over the course of three weeks.  She corrected my conjugations, broadened my vocabulary, drilled me on everything; but more importantly, she believed in me.  She pored over the grading rubric with me, and said, “There’s no way you’ll get a 5/25 on your oral test.  You’re much too smart for that.  You’re probably smarter than your teacher.  Don’t you believe that?”

And so, my return to Morocco brought me a happy surprise, even before I got my test results.  I see myself as a French-speaker now.  Not an expert, not exactly fluent, not entirely comfortable — but something has shifted.  I am “in the club,” as my niece once said.  I approach French-speakers with a “bonjour” instead of a “hello.”  If they speak to me in English, I respond in French.  When that little demon of self-doubt starts to niggle at me, I squish it down and say, “I did this in France.  I can do it here.  I have a friend in France.  I have friends here.  No one is judging me.  No one is expecting perfection of me.  This language belongs to me as much as to anyone else.”

Lesson #2: Never underestimate the power of a friendship.  Grammar books, dictionaries, and hard work are indispensible, to be sure — but the real power of learning is in relationships.  In safe spaces.  In honesty. In vulnerability.  In trust.

It is September.  I will have 400 students walking through my classroom door in a few days.  Children with all of the anxieties, abilities, and inner contradictions that I, as a reflective adult, navigate each day with a circle of cheerleaders around me.

Our little ones do not always have cheerleaders in their lives.  They do not have the benefit of decades of self-awareness, or multiple degrees, or friends who helped them pass the DELF B2.  They have us, their teachers, the gatekeepers of a club that must include them all.  Lesson #3 will be to throw open the doors.