AMC Blog - Lycée Mona Ozouf de Ploërmel

Hi, we are Lily and Léna from 1e AMC. In this article, awe will present our penfriend project and a subject from the news!

          At the beginning of this school year, we started the penfriend project with our AMC (English major) teacher Ms. Ruhlmann. We corresponded with Australian girls who are learning French at Pymble Ladies’ College, a girls' school next to Sydney. As it’s a same-sex school, all our penfriends are girls. They are in Year 9 so they are about 14 -15 years old, which is younger than us.

Lily:For me, this project has been a good idea because it helped the Australian girls work on their French while we improved our English. We can also learn things about them and their country and we can teach them the same things about France.

Léna: For me, it has been a very fun and instructive project! I think it’s very cool to have penfriends because we can exchange a lot of information on our respective countries. It’s a real adventure and it allows us to improve our English. Also, I love Australia so much so I’m really happy to have an Australian penfriend.

          The news subject we chose to talk about is the ban on social media under the age of 16 for the Australians teenagers. Snapchat, X, TikTok, Instagram and all social media will be forbidden from 10th December onwards. Only YouTube kids will still be allowed because it’s controlled. This decision was taken on 29th November 2024. The Prime Minister talked about teenagers who lost their lives because of social media and confirmed to Australians parents that the government had their back. It’s the first ban on social media in the world and there are various divergent opinions on that issue.

          As far as we’re concerned, our personal opinion is that we should do this in France as well. Indeed, we believe that children get influenced by the people they are watching and their behaviour starts to change. Children and teenagers spend their time on social media and forget about real life, the world outside of their phones. Because of that, they can’t really tell what’s the truth and what are lies. Of course, some teenagers are mature enough to separate what they see on social media and what happens in real life but a lot of them get influenced by the dream lives of the people they see on social media.

          However, in Australia, 77% of people think social media are a great way for their child’s development while others criticise the government. 87% of Australians would be in favour of more serious sanctions. 61% of them even think that social media should be banned for teenagers under 17. Among the concerned children and teenagers, point of views are divided too: 80% of children between the age of 8 and 12 use social media. 38% of Australian teenagers spend 3 or more hours a day on social media itself.

We asked questions to our penfriends and they responded that they don’t really care about the ban because they don’t use social media but they know classmates who do and who are disappointed and upset because of the government's decision. Moreover, they will be 16 soon so they won’t have to wait for very long. For them, it doesn’t matter at all.

          In France, the government didn’t get the

measure of this, but we think they should. In our point of view, teenagers get influenced by social media too much and they become more and more execrable and insolent. However, social media can be good and useful but we have to use them carefully. French teenagers spend “only” an average of 1.34 hour a days on social media, which it’s less than in Australia.

          So, here was our article on Australia. We hope you learned things! Thank you for reading.

Sources: statista.com, yougov.com, abc.net.au, gaasly.com, meltwater.com, nws.com.au, study.uq.edu.au