NPP 12: The Art Exhibition and Attitude to Error

 Here are some examples of pupils' work for the French Art Exhibition from 2026.

Most people's initial reaction is that this is a beautiful display and a lovely project to do. But one of the ideas that we are exploring in our National Priorities Project is the idea that the Art Exhibition Project risks pushing pupils into inaccurate work. Should we be asking pupils to be creative in their French, to focus on creating individual descriptions and creating meaning for a real audience? Or should we be rehearsing well-sequenced grammar and vocabulary for the sake of accuracy?

When we zoom in, there are errors in these pieces of work.

This one shows the kind of language we are expecting pupils to deploy. We have worked on il y a and how to say has and is. We have worked on gender, word order and adjectival agreement. Pupils are using some prepositions and some simple opinions.

What do the errors show and how important are they?

The gender of the word forêt. A word the pupil has learned for the purpose of this description. What does it show? That the teacher gave them the word without the gender? Or that the pupil looked it up and because it's a cognate, paid slightly too little attention to the gender and the accent? The transformation of the s on the end of chauve souris into an e. Is this a sign of the pupil "correcting" the French spelling so it conforms more to patterns of gender and number? They are making a feminine singular noun end in an e rather than an s precisely because they know a rule? And what about j'ai adore? What is going on there? There is confusion in the meaning of je / j'ai which may go back to a confusion in the phonics and pronunciation?

I am not shocked by these mistakes. I am interested in them. They are revealing. They reveal a pupil who isn't carefully copying the spelling of j'adore. They reveal a pupil who is operating at the next level up, where they are building sentences from French they think they know. And where their mistakes reveal the nascent formation of rules and patterns. 

As the teacher, this is incredibly useful in seeing the learning process in action. I know when I give this pupil a carefully controlled mechanical exercise, they will produce accurate French. By asking them to create their own picture and describe it in their own French, I get much more information about what is going on with their emerging conceptualisation and memorisation of the language.

Here's another example of exactly this:

We have already taught pupils how to say J'ai un chien qui s'appelle... So now to describe a picture, they learn how to say il y a un poisson qui nage... It was supposed to neatly extend what pupils know, and be a first glimpse into dealing with -er verbs. The mistake this pupil has made, is to think of this as "There is a flying bat" and "There is a climbing mouse". Again, in their booklet, the controlled practice sentences would have looked fine. It's only when they move to a freer self-expression, that the errors occur.

Except that last sentence is wrong. It's not that the errors only occur when they move to freer self-expression. The "error" lurking in their thinking was there all along. Asking them to write more freely has revealed the "error" in their thinking. So even if you think along the lines of accuracy being important, and carefully structured conceptualisation of the language being important, then this "freer" writing is revealing exactly what you need to know.

Of course, we can also view the "errors in thinking" as not so much "errors", but as the nascent recognition of patterns, the emerging formation and application of rules. The pupils are learning how the language fits together, how it diverges from English, how one word affects another. And you can see this in the very nature of the mistakes they are making.

What would a much more accurate example show us?  It might be that the work has been corrected by the teacher and redrafted by the pupil. It may be that the pupil stuck much closer to scaffolding and support. You don't write j'ai adore like the first pupil did, if you are simply copying. A much more accurate example may be showing us a pupil checking more carefully or perhaps more reliant on copying or adapting from a model answer rather than revealing the workings of their own thinking.

I love this picture and the French. But I don't believe for a second that it would indicate that the pupil isn't on exactly the same journey of discovering French syntax as the examples above.

I hope that the people who insist on the importance of accuracy aren't just doing so for the superficial sakes of accuracy for its own sake. I hope they are doing it because it's an indication of the development of the pupil's underlying grammatical understanding. And on those terms, I think this post argues that asking pupils to use their French more freely in order to describe their arwork, focusing on what they want to say, is not inimical to the process of mastering the rules of French syntax. It reveals the complexity of the task and the progress the pupil is making in internalising rules and patterns. I am not arguing this from some romantic notion of identity, self-expression, creativity (although I could). I am arguing it's actually an important part of the nitty gritty language learning.

Next Post: How do these insights into Error impact the rest of our curriculum?