AIBU to think if you want more people to study languages, why make it so difficult to be successful in the exams?

[annoyedandfrustratedagain]

Yet again the top end of my GCSE languages groups, with the exception of the very able, have achieved on average a grade or two lower in their languages GCSE than they have in other subjects.

We live in a country which is not known for being the most enthusiastic at learning foreign languages and I'm starting to wonder whether this is because it is so difficult to get the top grades at GCSE and A Level.

In my experience, for a lot of kids by the time they get into Y10, any love of language learning is quashed by constant pressure to achieve on the exams and some of the content we have to cover is completely irrelevant to today's teenagers.

I love languages, they fascinate me and the thrill of being able to speak to someone in their own language still gets me when I go abroad today. But how can I convince my students that learning a language is worthwhile when a. realistically when you go abroad, most people can speak some English anyway (and want to at every available opportunity) and b. they exam boards make it so hard for you to get a decent grade?

AIBU to think that if the government/exam boards want more youngsters to study a foreign language, instead of making the exams harder (which they are doing year on year), they should make them easier for the kids to be successful in? The content and grammar they have to be able to use after a few lessons per week for 5 years amazes me! I wish I could just teach languages for the love of language learning, not to be constantly jumping through ever changing hoops, predetermined by someone else as to what a successful linguist looks like. Rant over, sorry I'm just so disappointed for my students

annoyed

Please tell me what is hard about the GCSE and what we can do to help support our children.
I have a y8 dd who likes languages but I'm at a loss as to where she will need support.
I also think that languages have been overlooked in schools for too long and pity teachers such as yourself who are passionate about their subject.

MFL grade boundaries ar eMUCH MUCH lowr than sciences.
Be careful what you wish for.
THe proportion getting A* and A in MFL are triple that in sciences

MFL are not valued by the British because everybody speaks English, all over the world.

On holiday in Africa I heard a French Family and a German Family chatting to each other in English as it is the language they share.

Last summer we tried out our few words of Croatian to a lovely shopkeeper who asked us to let her try out her English with us

English is the language of business and diplomacy because it is the best in the world at double speak

Hence why MFL exams are marked easier than sciences

*Today 16:58 Witchend

But what I don't understand is that this "everyone does less well at languages" should show in the statistics clearly.
Because the grade boundaries are basically done by percentage. So top 5% get A next 8.7% get B etc. If the percentage for each grade boundary was much lower then I'm sure there would be huge comments raised.

The memorising languages are silly though Dd1 did French last year (in year 9 for some reason) and got a B, not being gifted in languages she was rather pleased. But all the exams seemed to be along the lines of.

1. Get given all the questions in French
2. Come home put questions into google translate.
3. Answer questions in English
4. Put answer back into google translate
5. Get teacher to check answers
6. Memorise
7. Regurgitate with no knowledge of what you're saying in the exam.

Hence no knowledge of actually constructing a sentence and very little vocab.*

Then your DD got a B because the teacher cheated.
And this is what skews results for the kids in my class because I do things by the book.

Because the grade boundaries are basically done by percentage. So top 5% get A next 8.7% get B etc. If the percentage for each grade boundary was much lower then I'm sure there would be huge comments raised.
Not true
look at the results information

MFL grade boundaries ar eMUCH MUCH lowr than sciences.
Be careful what you wish for.
THe proportion getting A and A in MFL are triple that in sciences

Where is this info from????
www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm

I think the issue is HOW languages are taught rather than the difficulty. If we are serious about teaching French in primary then we need mire than one lesson a week. Other countries do it by having PE, art and music in the target language as well as a language lesson. They also use a complete immersion approach. A lot of MFL lessons in England are completely conducted in Englidh by people with appauling accents.

Tiggeryoubastard

MFL like various other subjects in school, is not promoted very well and in many schools suffers from a lack of time compared to other subjects.

To say that the OP is bad at teaching is crass, especially as you have no frame of referance

Get them onto Pimsleur. I did both French and German at school, Spanish at university - required learning masses of words for each 'unit' (eg food and drink, culture, etc), very little of which I retained. Pimsleur got the grammar stuck in my head and my retention and ability to learn new words is also much better.

I can agree with the European examples.

We live in Germany and the second language starts in the first year of primary school. As far as I can tell it isn't really assessed at all and despite learning French for a year DS can count to thirty and say his name. I don't really expect him to have any usable French by the time he leaves primary school in three years - but what I do expect is that he'll have a level of familiarity with the language which would enable him to pick it up when he starts secondary and run with it much easier than someone who has had absolutely no exposure to French aged 11.

I teach English and one of my students when I first started was doing her Abitur which is similar to A Levels (but much broader, very intensive, similar in many ways to IB). She gave me a copy of the text they were studying and I was amazed to find it was the same text I'd studied myself for GCSE in my native language.

The expectations are really high and adults often seem embarrassed if they don't know any/much English. 95% of people can communicate at a basic level, even if they went to "Realschule" (not as intensive as the Abitur) and most will throw their hands up and apologise for their "Only school English!" as though this is some terrible standard when it's actually, while not perfect, perfectly adequate for communicating in most situations. I find it's only much older people who say they didn't learn any English at school at all (and this is in part because we live on the French border so they tend to do French first here.)

I was really interested in languages at school but I didn't get very far in them even though I got a B in French.