WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE: THE THIRD SPACE
Exams French Style
By Vanessa Couchman
In 2011, I was selected for the regional finals of a French national competition to find those
who are best at French grammar. The competition is open to native French speakers and
resident foreigners, but most of the participants are French. Twenty thousand people
entered and 10,000 went through to the regional finals. I hadn’t sat an exam for more than
20 years.
The candidates had to turn up at Toulouse University after lunch one Saturday. I arrived
early, but a crowd of hopefuls was already queuing in the French style, i.e. in a totally
disorderly fashion.
The organisers should have put up signs – A-D, E-H etc. – but everyone just crammed in
front of the tables. As a result, there were numerous sub-queues and snakes of people
trying to get to the right place. However, the delays provided ample opportunity for peoplewatching. The candidates were mostly middle-class. There were a few eccentrics and some
to whom the exam clearly meant a great deal. One man near me was mugging up his
French verbs in a well-thumbed primer.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit late?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no,’ he replied. ‘I’m using the waiting time for a little last-minute revision. Every second
counts.’
We filed into a university lecture hall later than programmed (nothing here in Southwest
France ever starts on time). The organisers took their places and we were off.
I almost fell at the first fence. I put my name in the right boxes (already an achievement),
but puzzled over the box that said ‘ville’. Did this mean one’s town of residence or the town
where the exam took place? I chose the latter, Toulouse, but on looking at the paper of the
woman in the row below (strictly cheating, I suppose), I realised they meant ville de
résidence.
The exam was in two parts. Part 1 included 30 multiple-choice grammar problems,
delivered by video. You had 15 seconds to answer each one. Fifteen seconds isn’t long in
your own language; it’s a nano-second in a second language. I stumbled through it and had
to make a lot of guesses.
Part 2 was a dictation delivered on video by the contest’s patron Philippe Delerm, a wellknown writer. His delivery was difficult to follow. A chorus of protest arose from the 300
candidates. The organisers re-wound the video; no good.
It’s easy to see how the French Revolution started. These respectable, middle-class
burghers were on the point of rioting when the organisers decided to deliver
the dictée themselves. It started well for me, since the woman who read it did so in received
French pronunciation. However, this caused more aggravation since most of the other
contestants were born and bred in the southwest and couldn’t follow her accent. Further
protests arose.
So they changed to another woman who spoke in the regional accent. This was my
downfall. The southwest accent is impenetrable if you haven’t grown up with it. Being a
foreigner, I couldn’t protest too much.
24 | May 2016