To think Spanish is now more popular than French

[Dappy777]

Would you say Spanish is now a more popular second language than French? I mean in the U.K. I went to a rubbish comprehensive in the late 1980s and French was the only option. They didn’t even teach German (that I remember). Back then, if someone could speak another language it generally seemed to be French.

Today, French seems less popular. My friend’s daughter, for example, is doing an A-level in Spanish. When I asked her why not French she said “oh Spanish is much more useful. You can travel all over central and South America with Spanish. All my friends want to study either Spanish or Italian.” My cousin’s son also dropped French to study Spanish.

100%. And yes, teacher availability is a big factor, which of course becomes a vicious circle: if (say) German is no longer taught as much, fewer people go on to study German, which means there are fewer German teachers, which means German can't be taught as it can no longer be staffed.

The fact that the chances of anyone actually using the specific language they learnt at school are very small (beyond a bit of holiday usage) surely means that we should really be promoting the very real, very significant benefits of language learning generally. The main one of these has to be massively improved knowledge and understanding of one's first language (English, for the majority of UK students). Standards of English really are pretty dire (I teach English to GCSE as well as MFL) and learning a foreign language improves students' English in a way that simply doing more English doesn't. There's way too much to go into here but it improves awareness of the structure/grammar of English as well as massively improving vocabulary, amongst many other things.

It would also, perhaps, mean that we would do away with the utterly, utterly pointless teaching of grammar terminology as part of English lessons at primary level - although to be fair, we could get rid of this now and it would make not one jot of difference to the standard of English, and in fact would probably improve it, as more time could be spent doing things that actually improve children's ability in their first language, i.e. reading and discussing good-quality texts. (And that's leaving aside for now the fact that materials used for grammar teaching at primary level (and beyond) are absolutely riddled with errors, e.g. labelling things conjunctions when they're adverbs, or pronouns when they're determiners, etc., etc. - I could go on!)

Again, there is a lack of understanding of the difference between learning one's first language and learning a second language, and this goes both ways (i.e. pointless grammar teaching in English and pointlessly trying to replicate how we learn our first language when learning a foreign language).

I agree.

A knowledge of English is pretty much essential in Europe and beyond. Even if someone intends to study and work only in their native country, they'll very often be required to demonstrate a good knowledge of English. When they travel, they'll probably not bother to use the local language but will get by in English.

So the reality is that unless they have a specific reason to learn another language, most British kids really don't need to. That's not to say there aren't any other benefits to learning a language, but they are rather abstract. Very different from a kid in Germany or elsewhere being surrounded by English pretty much from birth. And even when you do make the effort to learn a language, you find that people will insist on speaking English with you anyway. So it can be hard to find the motivation.