I'm experimenting in teaching French to DD

Furthermore I think there needs to be some lie detector to find out whether someone is half-French etc. There seems to have been a good deal of entente cordiale round these parts some years ago, as quite a few of the dcs' peers have French mothers. Of course these dcs are top notch at French, but their surnames give nothing away. Ds considered doing A Level French, but when he found out Jane S and Alex P were signed up, he immediately binned that idea, in spite of being reasonably enthusiastic.

What a very strange attitude, RhodaBull. In my DD's French school there are several half-French, half-English (or American) DC and the monolingual French DC fight to be put in groups with the fluent English speakers in order to learn from them.

I think the new GCSE will encourage better language learning as you will need a far better understanding of grammar to do well. However, I do have concerns that younger teachers may well find it difficult to teach as they weren't taught grammar particularly well at GCSE level. I was an MFL teacher for 20 years (mostly part-time) but got out 2 years ago. I now tutor (primary/secondary/adult) and work for a franchise owner teaching pre-school/after-school groups. It is so much more rewarding than secondary teaching - I'm in the North-East and languages just seem completely irrelevant to most teens round here unless they have connections with another country.

For my primary tutees, I use Usborne's 'Easy French' and have produced loads of resources to go with it. It's grammar-based but has a fun cartoon story to read as well.

I am a fully qualified language teacher, this is my 17th year teaching. I left the secondary school system once as I really didn't agree with the way MFL is taught. I spent 8 years as a peripatetic languages teacher in Primary Schools. It was great. I was able to tailor what I was teaching to each school/ class so that it was interesting for them and pupils made huge amounts of progress. Sadly, the government decided to pull funding so schools could no longer afford me.
I had to go back to Secondary out of necessity (I needed an income). Sadly, MFL is not a priority subject and it is difficult. I am the only French teacher in my (small) Secondary school and when I joined the school, MFL was hugely unpopular. I have worked my socks off to raise the profile of languages and students' enjoyment. Students are now enthusiastic and enjoy the subject but most won't take it at GCSE as it is seen as such a difficult subject, with limited use. Unfortunately Brexit seems to have reinforced this view.
Culture is a big part of it too. 'Well, everyone speaks English anyway', 'I'm never going to France, so what's the point' etc etc.
Grammar is a constant battle. As pps have said, our students have a lack of knowledge of grammar in general, so trying to teach them that the adjective comes after the noun etc is hard work. Lack of time for practising this certainly comes into it. Ideally, 45 minutes to an hour a day, but we get 2 hours a week.
I've no idea what the answer is. I love languages, and studying languages has created many opportunities for me. I'm happy to talk about this with my students, but the love of language in general is missing in my opinion. I read voraciously as a child, which gave me an early love of words. Very few children, in my experience, have this now.

Kleider Machen Leute! Some allegory about uniforms. The German post-War paranoia about uniforms sailed right over head of English pupils quite used to skirt and blazer and horrible kipper ties (at point when punk had just come in). Off at a tangent here, but a German language assistant we had was fascinated by our uniforms and she asked us how many we had each. She was absolutely horrified when we all replied we had one skirt and one blazer and one tie which were never cleaned in all the years of school, and two blouses washed once a week!

I did those A levels, too Rhoda. Never did really get what the hell was going on in Fruhlings Erwachen. Something about tights.

Unfortunately visiting capital cities is not much good for improving one's language. When we went to Berlin last year a waitress humoured me by listening to my laboured order in my best German. She then said, "You did very well!" in English

Many, many dcs give up A Level languages after AS Levels (or after one year, as it will be now) because it's all about grades. Furthermore I think there needs to be some lie detector to find out whether someone is half-French etc. There seems to have been a good deal of entente cordiale round these parts some years ago, as quite a few of the dcs' peers have French mothers. Of course these dcs are top notch at French, but their surnames give nothing away. Ds considered doing A Level French, but when he found out Jane S and Alex P were signed up, he immediately binned that idea, in spite of being reasonably enthusiastic. The syllabus was 25% speaking, which does not suit the badly-accented Brit at all. Back in my day a large component of the A Level was literature. I could read Der Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum but could barely utter a single word out loud and certainly not conduct a conversation.

Dd1 is doing A level languages, classs of 4-6 people.

I wouldn't hold out much hope that the new GCSE is going to improve things.

My DD is in y10 and loves languages. She wanted to pick German and French in her options but they couldn't timetable it because no one else in the school wanted to do two languages.

She is one term into the new German GCSE. Yesterday she was learning how to say "I enjoy stamp collecting!"

At Christmas we went to Berlin for a few days. She didn't speak a word of German to anyone. She claimed that she didn't know how to order chips because they hadn't done food yet!

Fortunately everyone spoke English so we didn't starve!

It's very sad that, when young people leave the state-controlled school system, they realise what it would have been nice to learn there but that they were prevented from doing!

Anecdotally there seem to be plenty of adults wanting to learn languages. I went to French classes for over 10 years, until the teacher who was running the advanced classes moved away, and they couldn't find a replacement. I still do conversation sessions with one of my old teachers. I have also just started learning Spanish as well.

People want to learn because they want to travel, many have homes abroad, several have children who live and/or work abroad, and some of the have married there, so people want to learn to communicate with their new in laws.

What does seem to be a growth area though is the availability of MFLs as possible optional undergraduate modules or even evening classes at quite a few universities. A very good way for MFL university staff to make up for the reduction in students with the language level for full time MFL degrees.

Indeed, teaching MFL is not an attractive career proposition. Very hard to imagine that it will open many doors in the UK.

New GCSEs are from next year. Current year 10

I am guessing that MFL teachers are getting rarer because the message is filtering through to graduates that MFLs are being reduced and are low priority particularly at A level in state schools.

Bobochic I was n't attributing blame just stating a view from my experience. I did wonder if part of the problem is that younger MFL teachers who were taught by new GCSE style have not themselves experienced the systematic teaching of grammar to children making it harder for them to apply it. I am sure some of the PPs who are MFL teachers could put me right on that.

leccybill - I don't think the new GCSE spec is harder! It's logical, constructive and makes sense. That is easier than dumbed down to mumbo jumbo, which was the previous situation.

It's not just England that foreign language teaching is no good.
In my native country, everybody learns English in junior high and high school. That's 6 years. Most of them cannot speak English at all after all those years.
Learn just to pass the exam won't work.

I remember the thread in Staff Room (I clicked because of the title) where the OP was a teacher with NO Spanish knowledge whatsoever was being made to teach it in her primary class

Oh I know, Rhoda. Properly qualified mfl teachers are what's needed, but I have no idea where we'd get them from!

The new style GCSE is very different (and much harder). There's no coursework so no memorising a passage.
There's a 'describing a picture/photo' element and lots of written translation.

It's much better but will be the death knell for MFL at GCSE and it is very hand so future cohorts will run a mile from it.

People who are properly qualified to teach MFL are discouraged from doing so by the insane syllabi, Rhoda. The heart and soul of any school is its curriculum, which needs to be properly supported with high quality teaching materials. Only then can decent teachers be both motivated and successful.

It's all very well suggesting properly-trained, nay, native-speaker MFL teachers, but just where are they going to come from? Maybe they could be bribed into the system somewhat in certain areas (although it's still difficult to recruit Maths and Science teachers, no matter how large the golden hello) but where are your MFL teachers in, say, Great Yarmouth?

I live in South East and MFL teachers are as rare as hens' teeth. Sil was MFL teacher and she pissed the school about no end (another story altogether) but she had them over a barrel because they simply couldn't find anyone else. In fact the school has now ceased to offer a MFL, due in part to lack of interest as well as difficulty in recruiting suitably qualified teachers.

Another point is fashions in languages. When I was at school and we had to choose a 2nd language it was all German! German! German! Europe/the City/business yada yada... I wish I had done Latin but the message was "dead language" . A few years later it was all Japanese! Everyone was scurrying along to after-work Japanese classes. Then it was Mandarin! All the little Huberts were learning this. Then it was back to Latin! And now... I think everyone's given up.

With primary, part of the problem is that most schools don't have a trained mfl teacher, but also I think it's often seen as a bit of an 'extra' and doesn't get much teaching time. I teach mfl once a week at my village primary. The children get half an hour once a week and that's it. Plus it's Spanish and they won't all necessarily start with Spanish at secondary school.

A lack of joined-up thinking between secondaries and their feeder primaries is part of the problem. It's all very well making mfl compulsory at primary, but even if you had a proper teacher and a decent amount of lesson time, it's no good if you have half the kids starting from scratch in year 7 because they learned a different language at primary.

In secondary there's also the issue of which languages you offer and at what age (if at all) a second mfl is added. At dd's school they start both French and Spanish in yr7, which is insane imo. The level of confusion between the two languages is horrendous in all but the most talented. They sometimes have French and Spanish on the same day, occasionally with the same teacher! In yr 8 many are still answering the register in the wrong language.

The teaching to the exam was ridiculous.

I couldn't believe it when my very well motivated dd came home and said that what happened was the teacher gave them the list of questions, they answered it, took it in and had it checked and then memorised it and regurgitated it for the exam. As I pointed out, having a fairly good memory, I could probably do an exam in any language (with our alphabet) in a couple of months with google translate.

I believe they're stopping this, with makes sense because it certainly didn't teach to speak a language.

Mine do languages at junior school, and really I'm not convinced of the merit. they have teachers from the local secondary in to teach it, but all they ever do is nouns and a few others. They never learn how to form a sentence. They learn to count, do the alphabet, colours then after that just do a lot of noun topics where they learn various animals and things like that. As that's basically vocabulary, I slightly wonder what the point is.