WHY IS FRENCH / GERMAN TAUGHT MORE THAN SPANISH?

[HAPPYFACE]

My dh and I had a choice of french or german in state secondary schools. When I said to him some primary schools are starting to do french he said he couldn't understand why spanish isn't taught more. Isn't it more spoken throughout the world than french and german? Thus making it more useful in adult life!
If we have got it totally wrong I'm sorry!
If we are correct, can something not be done?

I've never bought that argument: English may be the international language, but it's not universally spoken - I also know lots of spanish people who don't speak a word of it. It is true that jobs-market wise, it's more important for a spanish person to learn english than for an english person to speak spanish, but there are loads of places in the world where you do really need to speak a foreign language: much of inland Andalucia and southern morocco being among them.

well you do need to practice I guess.

Also remember that for many kids, being able to get a better job is just not a particularly motivating factor - it's only later that it becomes one. I love languages now, but I didn't really at school and still studied french.

I think I'm talking in circles now.

I really cannot think of any English person I know in the UK who can speak another language.

That's really sad, ks. But there are plenty of us out there. FWIW, I have only spent 5 continuous months in Italy (plus the odd holiday) but people still can't tell where I'm from when I speak. I put a lot of effort into learning it, but most of my ... ummm... yikes, 17 years of learning it have been either classroom-based or based on reading/speaking the language over here (i.e. in the UK). I can assure you that there are plenty of decent-to-fluent Italian speakers in the UK who are in the same situation. (I've taught some of them!)

I think that, in teaching (and it must be said that I don't teach in schools, so I am not in any way speaking with authority here) the key thing is to get a balance between fluency and grammatical accuracy. The former is essential if learners are going to be able to hold a conversation abroad. But the latter is also important. An Italian might understand what you mean if you say 'io domani andare cinema', but they'd also know for sure that you were foreign!

Sorry, first line of that should have been in quotation marks...

Another one here who learnt to speak fluently and to native speaker standard in the classroom. I did have 10 weeks in Germany between Year 11 and Year 12, which helped. But I was pretty much fluent before I went, and when I finished school and went over again, I was usually taken for German.

The key is a superb teacher with flawless pronunciation and clear teaching of grammar and memorisation of vocabulary. I also think the ability to speak without an accent is usually just a gift - like whether you can sing in tune or not. Still need a teacher with perfect pronuncation though.

I just loved my German teacher, and had the great privilege last year of being her son's maths teacher!! Weird but lovely.

In fact, I actualy had the same years of French teaching than German (6 for each) but am ROTTEN at French. Can barely construct a sentence and know no vocabulary. The difference was mostly the teacher but also innate. For some reason I fell in LOVE with German. French leaves me cold.

Now Latin on the other hand... :o (I torture my Year 9s in maths by finding the roots of all the terminology in Latin and Greek!)

at the teaching some of you got.

I did French and Spanish GCSE, was prob one of the better ones in the class for both, but I couldn't do much more than ask the way to the bank after 5 years of lessons .

I'm not exactly what you'd call native speaker standard, no.

ks - re the those that can thing: that's another thing i don't buy. In my experience the vast majority of people (well over 90% of my students, and all bar one of the people I have watched try to learn spanish) actually learn at very similar rates as long as they work hard and work efficiently (you know the stuff - vocab lists and thing).

Californifrau - my dh is an IO. He does a very good 'what is the purpose of your visit?' in Japanese!

I do think that there are different skills in learning a language which come more or less easily to different people. I find the accent difficult (can't 'do' different British accents either), but have always found learning grammar and vocab quite easy. Dh has atrocious grammar but a great accent and he convinces people that his Italian is much better than it really is simply by sounding convincing! There's a lot of talk nowadays, isn't there, about 'learning styles', and I think that this is probably quite relevant to language learning too.

I am also a great believer in the importance of reading to learning a language, and I feel that this may be a skill which is undervalued in schools these days. I find that students are much more prepared to talk in class and to 'have a go' than they were in my day (20 years ago). But many of the students I teach have got an A'level in a modern language without ever having read anything really in-depth (and I mean not even a lengthy 10-20 page article, let alone a whole book). It makes me laugh, because the first book I ever read in a foreign language was Madame Bovary... perhaps erring a bit far in the other direction, but (imho) better than no reading at all. I have done some work on this, and have created a 'how to read' course for our students because they find this so challenging. But, as I said before, I learnt a lot of my Italian from reading and I still read in Italian as much as I do in English (just for fun, not just for work). I am also a fan of reading aloud (on one's own, at home) as a way of gaining a sense of how the language should sound, so that you can pick up a 'feeling' for what sounds right. Certainly, when my dds start learning a language (whichever one it is - though hopefully not Spanish, as I can't help with that, lol!) I will be encouraging them to read additional material to what is provided in the classroom. (They may well tell me to get stuffed at that point, of course... They are enthusiastic about learning foreign languages now - at ages 4 and 6 - but whether that will last till they're teenagers I just don't know!)

Yes, for historical reasons. Historical reason being that within historic legal/constitutional documents there is widespread use of French. Hence French was often the second language - although mostly only applicable to the learned/aristocracy.

Rushing so sorry for short reply... No, you can't get all that 'in the classroom' - I said it's possible to learn well without living in the country for an extended period. But I agree that learning a language has to involve a lot of work outside the classroom - talking to people, reading, more reading, listening to the radio, watching TV, talking to more people and, um, some more reading. With all that, it's perfectly possible to learn a foreign language well from the UK.

Hi ks... sorry - misunderstood you. No, IME/IMO it's not possible purely within a classroom context (that is, without the setting of homework, learning of vocab and reading of TL material, etc. in addition to the actual classes). I believe that learning a language is like learning a musical instrument: it needs practice, and the most talented teacher can only give students the wherewithal to learn - the learning has to be done by the students themselves.

Tbh, ks, I do think it's a languages gift. For some reason I can mimic pronunciation very easily - from Japanese to French to German. I have a good ear for the sounds. So as long as the person teaching me had native speaker fluency and pronunciation I could pick that up.

We were given great big vocabulary lists that we simply had to learn by heart. By final year, I started reading German novels and reading Der Spiegel every week with dictionary in hand - this really helped with fluency. But I accept that for most people it would be much harder to bridge the gap to oral fluency. What can I say? I ended up frequently being mistaken for German after only learning at school. That's not to say I wouldn't sometimes be stumped at a pub if people went totally slang... but in ordinary day-to-day activities like going shopping or travelling or meeting people I could pass myself off as German most of the time.

Good point, Sue. We have a television station in Australia devoted to multicultural programming, and they have lots of programs in different languages. Just watching the news a few times a week in another language really helps.

Because France and Germany are nearer if you were going to swim there?

I learnt French and German at school. I am glad that I learnt both, but I think there is a good argument for teaching Spanish or Italian first as they are both languages that 'follow the rules'.

I agree with bloss - it is something to do with having an 'ear' for it. Like bloss I can emulate native accents really easily - I came to England to do 'A' levels at 17 after 7 years of standard English lessons at my German grammar school (and 3 months in Australia at 16) and people usually thought I was from Wales.
I live in Yorkshire now and sound just as Yorkshire as my dh who has lived here all his life.
I can do the same in other languages. It just seems 'really easy'.
I think one of the problems with MFL teaching in the UK however is how few language lessons pupils have. Most seem to do just 2 or 3 hours a week - hardly enough. It needs to be taught every day really to properly sink in.