smallwhite wrote:Sarafina wrote:
I would invested in more lessons on Italki to prepare for my speaking exam. ...
I should have been more forward in approaching the native French speakers in my school...
I should have started going through a comprehensive grammar book with numerous exercises...
... vocabulary ... reading ... I wish that I started doing this during my first year of the IB.
You would do more of these, and less of what?
I would have spent less time waiting for the school to help me. I spent the first year just going to the lessons and doing little homework they gave me and I naively thought that it was enough because I was blinded by how great last year's French results were so I thought that school knew what they were doing and would get me there.
I wasn't proactive during my first year of IB because I thought school would sort me out e.g. provide after school support, eventually offer conversation class. For students who took higher level sciences like Chemistry, they had Chemistry club after school twice a week to help out with particular topics in the curriculum and they even had some support sessions at lunchtime. I assumed that the same thing would happen with French. In my French teachers' defense, the vast majority of my classmates were already fluent in French and just needed to work a bit on their writing and reading skills or they had lived to France when they were young or they were from Italy/Portugal/Spain and already spoke a high level of French when they arrived. They didn't care with whatever grades I would end up with as the class' average grade would still be pretty high which is why I can imagine they were so reluctant to help me even when I explicitly told them about how much I was struggling.
(For a bit of background before I started the IB I used to do A-levels and I did only Science subjects and I didn't even touch French for a whole year before I then decided to HL French which was pretty dumb in hindsight. When I started IB HL French I had literally forgotten practically all my French. I was probably a A1 when I started.)