Just why are we so bad at languages in the UK?

[Tournament]

Ds2 in in y5 and has done Spanish on and off for nearly 3 years. He can count to 10, say hello and goodbye and sing a few songs. DS1 ys yr7 he did the same at Primary, but is now learning French and German.

We were on an activity holiday at Easter and met a really lovely German family. After dinner, our DCs ran back to the accommodation for the TV by the time we caught them up, they were playing Scrabble, with the German family, in English!

Their boys were 8 & 10 and both could communicate well in English at the start of the week. By the end of the week, I'd say they were both fluent.

I don't think my boys would even have tried hello/goodbye willingly.

'writing fluently'

I have to say that it is far easier now to study MFL in the UK than it was when I was at school. It is so easy on the internet to find spoken and written MFL language content - masses of lessons, interactive practice, as well as all the videos, newspapers and other website content.

If you want to learn it - it is all out there for you to practice with (unlike when I was at school when it was a major effort to get anything in a foreign language).

The problem is that it takes effort to learn a language and most Brits for some reason can't be bothered to make that effort.

They don't have to; a Pole or a Turk can see the huge personal value to themselves in learning English but it's a bit nebulous to most people why they would find it useful to learn German or French. Especially with the widespread myth that "all X-Country-people speak English" anyway.

I'm amazed that you think "most Brits for some reason can't be bothered to make that effort."

You really can't see the fairly obvious reason why? Because they were born speaking the world's lingua franca. Learning another MFL therefore becomes a thing you might like to do rather than something that bestows upon you a basic building block of higher-level employment. All Europeans in 'international-style' jobs can or want to speak English. A friend of mine teaches English in her home, Her biggest clients are the French and Italian professionals who see that the way forward for them, out of the collapse of their country's economy is better English. The way out of ours isn't better Portuguese!

France, famously guarding of its language is, right now, struggling with new legislation that will allow higher level university courses to be taught in English so as to widen their appeal and to allow exposure to a vastly greater pool of resource. Apparently many unis have been doing so for years much to the Academe Francais' (sp?) irritation!

To me I find a degree of perversion in the notion that 'we rude English speak English because we are arrogant and feel superior to others, hence feel no need to learn other languages' rather than 'our language has become the de facto language of international communication and the reality is, we no longer 'own it' at all therefore need feel no superiority in speaking it, often no better than a EAL speaker'.. But this shouldn't make us hang our heads in shame and go and learn Estonian or whatever.

Q "I've been on holiday with very intelligent people who refused to open their mouth and order a beer in any foreign language they hadn't studied past A-level in case they made a mistake or sounded foreign. Very perfectionist but you never get very far if you are too self-conscious". Yes, but the waiter will reply in English, won't he?!

I agree with Erebus - the language we speak has ended up as the world's lingua franca so we feel we don't need to bother.

A problem now is that we don't know which language to teach in schools, whereas other non-English speaking nations have the obvious candidate in the English language.

Sadly, the "I don't need to" has fed into an attitude of "it's probably terribly difficult anyway", so even people who would find it beneficial are daunted by it. I can see it in my dd: she is heavily into literature and theatre so learning French would have obvious benefits, but she seems to have developed all sorts of hang-ups about it.

Not sure the difficulty of choice is such a biggie: when I was at school in Sweden it was taken for granted that you would learn both English and either French or German. Once you went on to college there was a good deal of pressure to learn the other language there. 3 languages was the norm for anyone planning to go on to university. Nobody suggested that you should only learn English. And I can't see any reason why French would have been more important or more accessible to us than to the Brits- France is further away and there are fewer French words in the language. Most of the people I met at uni had a good knowledge of at least 3 or 4 languages. They must have managed their choices.

It was just assumed that learning languages is a Good Thing. It was also considered cool. We all wanted to travel after school, and travelling meant entering another culture, trying to become part of it, most of my friends went out as au-pairs and not necessarily to the English speaking countries.

That's a good point cory - that people in other countries are better at learning a range of languages, not just English.

but Cory was in Sweden.....

It's somehow no longer seen as a Good Thing in England, (and I do mean England, not the UK). Maybe if all universities insisted on an MFL for all courses of study, then it might begin to redress the balance? So there was the expectation that an educated person spoke at least one other language?

I've been doing classes in Spanish for the better part of the last ten years. There is no lack of appetite for people wanting to learn and the beginner's classes start off full, but people soon drop away. With adults, it's usually time pressures, work takes them away and that sort of thing which causes them to drop out.

OK... so

there are very similar issues to music education here.

there are people out there who will systematically teach children who don't have it naturally to have a musical "ear". But not many schools or parents take them up on this because it doesn't seem as much of an achievement as learning the trumpet. Whereas if you have had the privilege, as I have, of watching a child schooled in ear-training to learn the trumpet, you see it's all worth the initial investment, and you can also see how that child is mentally prepared to learn almost any instrument.

Is there anyone really thinking deeply about what the pre-vocab skills would be to systematically teach an ear for languages? In music, we now know that it's all about exposure and having some involvement, and about using your own voice from the earliest stages. We know that lots of talking about music, lots of use of vocabulary, is education about music but not education in it.

I think that vocab learning should always follow behind ear and tongue - as is now accepted in music. As said above, the internet means that there is no excuse for picking up a bad accent.

I don't mean to be horrible there, but I don't think there is or should be much future for teachers of foreign language who speak with a strong English accent.

I would absolutely disagree that learning an additional language is useless. Completely aside from the advantage of being able to speak to other people in their own language instead of considering yourself all superior and expecting them to speak yours, knowing another language enables you to think in new ways.

I speak two languages in addition to English, one of them structured in a similar way but a very simple, literal language. I studied this language for 12 years through school, and when I went to university, I found that if I thought about maths in terms of this language (basic and literal), mathematical functions were easier to get to grips with.

The other language I learned as an adult and is a very ancient one with a completely different grammatical structure and a different script. I find I can express concepts in this language which English just can't.

So I am very much of the opinion that the more languages you learn, the more different ways you learn to think and conceptualise. You can't think without words, and the more words you know, the better you can think!

I think languages should be taught by someone who comes from the same country for a start e.g. French teacher teaching French. Also, one lesson, or two a week is rubbish. There was a thread a couple of months ago about this subject and the German MNers were saying that parents play English tv/music at home, there are English nursery rhymes in kindergarten. There is more of an immersion and sense of doing it properly and taking languages seriously. I do think Erebus made very valid points though.

Rushing ... so pls excuse short-hand ...a couple of quick points:

(1) Cory I wouldn't be so confident about English being the 'de facto' language of international communication for the forseeable future. If dd lived in the UK, I would make sure that she was learning Spanish and Chinese.

(2) Erebus as it happens, between 60and 70% of English words are derived from French but agree, nowadays would favour Spanish over French

(3) Lisaletta (and the poster much lower down the thread who said that the benefits of learning languages while young are exaggerated) there are more advantages to language learning at an early age than just increased communication skills ie increased cognitive function and problem-solving skills (something to do with the development of brain synapses I think - you use a different part of the brain to learn languages before the ages of 5-8 yrs than you do thereafter) eg this link

(4) thesecretmusicteacher I would argue that the same principle applies to business meetings whether one is resident in the country or not, but completely agree about the importance of children being exposed to (at the very least the possibility of) communication in languages other than their own and agree, we can't justify non-mother tongue language teachers in schools - they are essential I think.

You cannot teach an ear for languages - all humans are able to acquire languages and all learn at least one from birth. The important thing if you want to learn a particular language is regular repeated exposure to mother- tongue speakers from an early age. Languages are best learned over a long time period - hence the silliness of two year GCSE courses.

there are very similar issues to music education here.

That's very interesting. I once had a brilliant music teacher whose proud boast was that he could get a tune out of anyone - even those who didn't think they could sing.

One problem with both music and languages is that they have been seen as rather elitist pursuits, rather than being for enjoyment and communication. They have been seen as something that only a minority are capable of doing. Yet I know people who were only considered average as school so not offered languages or music; circumstances have taken them abroad to live and they have ended up in e.g. Sweden, Italy, where outside the main cities and tourist areas, they most definitely need to learn the language and have done so.

It's important to have the confidence to give it a go and kids don't get that at school. They just need to start to talk and make mistakes and not be sitting at desks in a classroom. Language isn't something that is learnt by looking at a school book, hearing english spoken by the teacher & getting told off for making an error, it's something that has to be used to reinforce knowledge

It's not surprising most children find learning another language not useful. Like most already said, it's the default business language in the world.

But I found it disturbing when some people think you can get by with English anywhere in the world. Maybe it's true in Europe (except France, where I found actually no one would answer me in English). I've travelled to Korea and Japan and I can honestly say English doesn't work there at all. I was reduced to pointing at things and gesturing by hand. It's true if you are there on business trips, you'll be able to get by in English only. We usually get a taxi transfer and we also have our meeting venue and hotel printed out in the local language. But if you want to venture into the street, expect no one able to understand you.

And it's not true in foreign land they listen to english songs. It's definitely not true in the far east.

Anyway, how many young people expect to grow up and work locally in a very foreign country? I don't mean working for a multinational on a foreign contract. I know two people who works as a postdoc in a Japanese university. I mean a job as local as that? I think it's very rare.

Anyway, how many young people expect to grow up and work locally in a very foreign country? I don't mean working for a multinational on a foreign contract. I know two people who works as a postdoc in a Japanese university. I mean a job as local as that? I think it's very rare.

I suppose we don't really know.... we don't know whether in the future people will travel more or less (peak oil, climate change, etc).

I think the current model is broken. There is very little in favour of rote-learning vocab. unless it happens to float your boat intellectually. I think, as a feminist, that it's telling that I can use charming anecdotes in several European languages but have no idea how my car works....

Better models might include joining in, via skype, your favourite class (say, maths or history or music) in a classroom in the country of your choice. You have to be outnumbered... it's pointless to have one token foreigner....

another way you could learn...... if, as a younger teenager, you went overseas and helped out in a local school abroad, say in a nursery.... where 90% of communication is non-verbal and you would "tune in" to what the children said very intently (because they cannot translate)....

I think we need to accept that the traditional model is not producing many people who really benefit, and almost none to benefit the economy. However, that doesn't mean there's no value in learning a foreign language, just that traditional school lessons may not be the place for it.

Perhaps looking at the history of words and where they come from and how language has developed would help. Another thing would be learning about a countries culture and history and what it's like for the children''s age group who live would help interest. The children could learn some basic phrases and have a context for it. The teachers could ask what languages are in the class at school and the children who speak another language/s could do a presentation on it.

In the case of Germany, OP, they teach them differently. So probably don't start English till year 5 (depends a bit on school and state) but learn vocabulary lists which are tested, learn the grammar, have a lot of written exercises and again are tested regularly for their yearly grade. Do that for 3 years and the dc have a fair grasp of main verbs and a wide vocabulary. They don't do a taster of French, then a taster of Spanish etc. They start with English or French usually and then they have to stick at it. It isn't an easier subject than say maths or mother tongue German.

We do more singing and a bit of this and a bit of that fun activities in primary (which is nice, I do like that approach but it just isn't sufficient to move you on). A blend of both the German and the British approach would be a good way forward IMO.

thesecretmusicteacher DH went on a exchange trip to some french speaking island on a language trip when he was at school. (We are from NZ). He said the kids only want to speak English to them! I think that wouldn't be a rare experience. I can't think of many countries where English isn't taught. The kids will definitely want to try out their English on you. It's very different when you end up working overseas, and trying to talk to your taxi driver, or order food at a local food stall.

My two postdoc friends in Japan both have a PhD in robotics. Japan is very very strong in robotics research. In most other area in science you have a choice to go to the US or Europe. One of the postdocs did Japanese at school. The other didn't but is learning it now in Japan. Though I agree if you know a language fluently, you have more doors open in research level sciences. One of the girls I did my postdoc with now has a lectureship in France. The teaching language is French. (She's Romanian but speaks English and French).

I don't know what's the answer is to teaching MFL in the UK. We have the same problem in NZ, btw.

Agree, it's because we just don't need to speak other languages at all/well.

I have a degree in two MFL and speak two others reasonably well. I rarely use them, because wherever I go in the world, my interolocutor wants to practice English on me - no matter if I speak their language better!

I'm glad I studied MFL, but I often wish I'd been born French or whatever so my aptitude for languages could really have given me a heads up.

Forgot to say I was also asked to apply for a postdoc in France. It was a very very good institute, in an industry linked project. But I was too scared to do it as I can only count to 4 in French and say a dog, a cat, etc. This is despite a few years of French at school. So there's definitely an opportunity lost.

....but learn vocabulary lists which are tested, learn the grammar, have a lot of written exercises and again are tested regularly for their yearly grade.

This doesn't really explain why they speak English well. We used to follow the same model, and were pretty poor at speaking. I had five years of French using this method, got a decent enough O level, and could barely ask for a cup of coffee the first time I went to France as a 16 year old.

rights... gosh...

How about this? Let other countries specialise in multiple language acquisition. How about if we specialised in being really good at, say, physics, as a country, and recognised language-learning-via-school (as opposed to via immersion/foreign parent) as an arts subject to be taken for general intellectual fulfilment? As important - indeed as deadly serious a subject - as lifelong study of the Beethoven string quartets - but something very unlikely to earn you your major wage.

I mean, how much are we spending per child on them saying "excusez-moi, ou est l'eglise?" and then not actually understanding the answer..... ? And what is the opportunity cost of them deciding against engineering under the fond illusion that writing A-level essays in moderate French is an employable skill? Is it really worth the money unless we get a better handle on what we are doing it for?