The cognate trap in a work-placement blog
A student is working on a Level 2 reading assessment using a 280-word blog post by a French teenager about 'mon stage de trois jours dans une entreprise de jeux vidéo'. The text contains: 'Je m'attendais à créer des jeux, mais j'ai surtout fait du café et du classement de dossiers.' It also says: 'Depuis septembre, je fais un stage d'observation le mercredi.' and 'Il y a deux ans, j'ai visité une entreprise à Montréal.' About the boss: 'Le patron avait l'air sympa, pourtant il ne nous a pas adressé la parole.' The questions ask: (a) What did the writer actually do during the placement? (b) How long has the placement been running, and how often does it take place? (c) What was the boss like, and how do you know? The student answers: (a) 'created video games', (b) 'since September', (c) 'sympa'. They score 2 out of 6 and conclude that they need to learn 200 more vocabulary items. They have one week before the assessment.
1. Explain how three specific language features misled the student, quoting the French.
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(1) 'Je m'attendais à créer des jeux, mais...' - 'je m'attendais à' means 'I expected to', not 'I did'. The 'mais' signals a contrast: the expectation was not the reality. The student saw 'créer des jeux' and ignored the framing verb and the contrast. The actual activities are 'fait du café' and 'du classement de dossiers' - making coffee and filing. (2) 'Depuis septembre, je fais un stage d'observation le mercredi.' - 'depuis' + present tense means the placement started in September and is still going, but 'le mercredi' means it happens on Wednesdays, not every day. The student's answer 'since September' is only half the answer and misses the frequency. (3) 'Le patron avait l'air sympa, pourtant il ne nous a pas adressé la parole.' - 'avait l'air' means 'seemed' and 'pourtant' means 'however'. The boss seemed nice, but did not speak to them. Answering 'sympa' reverses the point because the student stopped at the familiar-looking word and missed the contrast and the negation 'ne...pas'. The common thread is that the student read individual words, not the connecting words that carry the writer's meaning.
2. What pre-reading and during-reading strategy should the student use, and how would it change each answer?
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Pre-reading: read the questions first and identify the type of information required - an activity, a duration plus frequency, and an impression with evidence. Then skim the text for time markers and connectives before translating: 'depuis', 'il y a', 'mais', 'pourtant', 'surtout'. During reading: underline contrast and negation words and draw arrows from old information to corrected information. This would change the answers as follows. (a) The student would see 'je m'attendais à... mais j'ai surtout fait...' and answer 'made coffee and filed documents', not 'created games'. (b) The student would separate 'depuis septembre' (start point) from 'le mercredi' (frequency) and answer 'since September, one day a week - Wednesdays'. (c) The student would see 'avait l'air sympa, pourtant il ne nous a pas adressé la parole' and answer 'he seemed nice, but he did not speak to us', giving the evidence. The strategy is not more vocabulary; it is reading for structure and stance.
3. The student plans to learn 200 more words in one week. Evaluate this plan.
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The plan is understandable but poorly targeted. Vocabulary knowledge matters, but the errors here are not caused by unknown words: 'créer', 'jeux', 'sympa', 'septembre' are all words the student already recognised. The errors come from syntax and discourse: 'je m'attendais à', 'mais', 'pourtant', 'depuis', 'le mercredi', 'ne...pas'. Learning 200 isolated words in a week is also unlikely to transfer to reading under time pressure, and it consumes the week that should be spent on strategy practice. A better plan is 20–30 minutes a day with three short texts: read the questions first, skim for gist, underline connectives and time markers, answer, then justify each answer with a quotation from the text. Learn words in families and phrases - 's'attendre à', 'avoir l'air', 'adresser la parole à' - rather than as a list. Success would be measured by improved scores on inference questions, not by the number of words memorised.