Danville Students Ace Grand Concours French Exam

DANVILLE, CA - Incroyable! French students at Monte Vista High School recently scored exceptionally high on Le Grand Concours, a national exam that tests students in their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.

Jolene Pham ranked highest with a Gold Award, which is awarded to students who score in the 95th percentile and above. Just 519 out of the 8,951 across the country who took the exam received a Gold Award.

Olivia Canova, Melanie Vincent, Liam Dolan and Meghan Zhang received a Silver Award for placing in the 85th to 94th percentile. Karen Sunando received the Bronze award for her place in the 75th to 84th percentile and fifteen students earned the Certificate d’Honneur for finishing in the 50th to 74th percentile.

Magali Le Bouder, who teaches French at Monte Vista High School and Charlotte Wood Middle School, told Patch she feels that the Grand Concours exam is even more difficult than the AP exam, because students do not spend nearly as much time studying for it.

“AP, they practice all year long for that test, sometimes for two years because most of the classes now are combo classes of 4 and 5,” she said. “Le Grand Concours, they don’t practice except for maybe once or twice in the classroom for 20 minutes. It really reflects their actual level of what’s in the classroom. Plus they compete against so many more students across the U.S.”

In 1936, the American Association of Teachers of French established the National French Contest, later called the Le Grand Concours (“The Great Contest”) to determine student achievement in the language. Today, about 100,000 students across the country complete level-appropriate exams, despite an overall decline in studying French as a foreign language. According to a report from the Modern Language Association, 129 French programs were discontinued at American universities between 2013 and 2016.

French is far from the only language affected: American universities discontinued 651 total foreign language programs during the same time period.

In the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, Le Bouder says it has been a constant struggle to keep the French program afloat. She won’t be teaching high school-level French next year due to low enrollment, and is instead teaching English language learners, and introductory Spanish.

That’s been part of a longer trend of dwindling French enrollment and class reassignments. Le Bouder began teaching French only at Monte Vista, but was then assigned to teach middle and high school classes. In 2022, the district stopped the French program at Stone Valley Middle School in Alamo. She was transferred to Charlotte Wood Middle School, and given two French sections.

“I had 1A and 1B. At the end of this year, they told me not enough enrollment for 1A, so you’re only getting 1B. They had 15 students enrolled, but they couldn’t afford to pay for an extra section for me. Fortunately, we fought and parents stepped up and actually found the funding to fund my 1A so the program doesn’t close. Otherwise in less than two years, my French program at Charlotte Wood would’ve been closed as well,” she said.

That is partially why Le Bouder is happy her last high school French learners did so well on Le Concours National.

“It shows that there’s value in learning French, because they can become fluent, and they can leverage that knowledge in instances other than the classroom,” she said. “That’s why I’m doing so many extra things outside the regular curriculum to show students how valuable it is to have French as a second language, how much it can bring them in the long term. It makes them stand out, and it teaches you so much about your own language too.”

Ten of her middle school students wrote French poetry that will be published in the Association Poétique Luna Rossa anthology, which will be available on Amazon. Students also participated in the Manie Musicale worldwide singing contest, in which 150,000 students all over the world vote in a March Madness-style bracket for their favorite songs.

“It raises engagement through the roof,” she said. Her students filmed themselves dancing to one of the songs, and the footage was used as part of the video that revealed the semi-final reveal video.

“Just that was one example of how introducing different extracurricular activities and events can really ground our teaching into real life, and get them to keep learning,” she said.