Do you think it's important for your dc to learn another language?

[Earlybird]

Listening to a debate on radio about whether or not it is important/valuable for our dc to learn another language. One side says 'yes' because we must be well educated to compete with graduates from other countries. Opposing view says 'nice but not necessary' as English is universal language for International business.

Your thoughts? Are your dc learning a language atm, and if so, which one?

I'm hearing an awful lot about Mandarin Chinese - lots of leaflets for it around my part of London, but I don't know anyone whose child is doing it.

But do our children ever actually learn these languages? Ds has been 'learning' French for 5 years now and still can't say much more than 'Excusez moi'. I would be all in favour of it if they did learn it, maybe a minority do? I still think best way to learn is to go over to France or wherever and live there for a year aged about 18.

more or less serenity, the italian school system is completely different (and stuck to ancient times) so I chose a high school were ancient greek and latin were taught for 5 years (and english only for the first two years...). Anyway I loved it.
Your children will certainly learn a bit of the odyssey and classical mythology!!!

With the decline in MFL at secondary there are plenty of teachers about, the problem is the logistics and money of how this is going to work at primary level.

What is the class teacher going to be doing whilst the language specialist is teaching languages? Languages can fit in to PPA time partly, but most teachers want their PPA time as a solid block of one afternoon a week: but that doesn't suit language teaching.

I don't know what the solution is, without widescale changes to primary schools.

At our secondary last year our yr9s took GCSE or Entry Level certificates after 3 yrs of language learning and did very well. I think this is the future. With the pressures from other subjects it's always going to be hard to get children to choose MFL as an option unless the system (internal or national) makes them. At our school over the past few years we've had between 8 and 30 students opting for MFL out of 200 in the year

They'll have to follow the private school model where we have specialist teachers in all (or most in some schools) subjects, the form teacher herself/himself being one of the specialists.

When the current initiative was announced, I was seriously considering retraining as a primary languages teacher and in fact there was a CHE offering a PGCE in MFL for Middle Years (8-12) in Twickenham.
When it became clear that the languages in primary schools were going to be taught by non-specialists and non-qualified teachers I just gave up . Science, literacy, numeracy - all have to be taught by a teacher. So why not MFL
Ds is learning French and we are reinforcing this by encouraging him to speak when we visit and by having a children's French dictionary lying around, plus access to our old French copies of Tintins and Asterixes.
He has an excellent ear and likes languages (also interested in how they work, derivation of words etc) so we will encourage him to apply to the local grammar which offers Mandarin, Latin and the International Baccalaureate. When he is older we will look for a penfriend in France for him too.
And we'll do the same for dd, provided the real spark of interest is there
idlemum, my grammar went comp but to its credit continued to offer Latin and for a time Russian as well.

I would love my DSs to learn a language. DS2 in particular is interested in language and derivations, and picks up bits and pieces quickly wherever we go ("What does Keluar mean? Oh, I see, it's Exit"). There is an after-school French club, though DS1 didn't learn much there, but there is a waiting list for DS2's year.

I don't think it's so much about practical everyday usage (though of course that is fantastic), but about all those things Aloha eloquently said.

The DSs and I were talking about the origin of language at the weekend and deciding that nothing really had a 'real' name, as every language calls things something different. We didn't quite get on to Proto Indo-European, but I have plans....

I'm biased as I'm a linguist (Russian and French), though, and I just love those rather pointless 'word-facts', like the fact that the Russian word for 'station' is 'vakzal', from Vauxhall, or that 'bistro' means 'quickly'. You know.

I grew up in Ireland where Irish is compulsory from about age 4 and another language is compulsory at secondary level. SO for my equivalent of A level I did 2 languages and for a short time did Latin.

Very bad in my experience to make learning a language compulsory. Ireland and the learning of Irish is very political and for that reason an unusual zeal is employed when teaching it. In fact if you do your other subject through Irish you got extra marks in your exams and for good measure if you failed Irish you had failed all your exams even if you had straight As in the other subjects. It may be different now.

I was never very good at languages (suspect the type of teaching and the zeal had something to do with it) and I felt I wasted a lot of time doing something I was not very good at and didn't particularly enjoy. I do think it should be available in primary school but from my experiences I would hate for my kid to be forced to learn a language.

Yes - both my DSs have studied French up to GCSE (and DS1 took Latin as well). To make it "relevant" for them it is vital that they spend some time in the country. School exchange trips are OK but are sometimes too early in secondary school. DS2 went to France last year at the end of Y10 and did a tennis course at an UCPA centre. He came back enthusiastic about France and the French and with good conversational skills in teenage French plus a much better accent. I'm not sure though whether his vocabulary would be very acceptable to GCSE oral examiners!

I don't know about Mandarin Chinese but after English, French is the most commonly spoken language.

I think that once you give your kids the basics it is far easier for them to pick it up later on in their education. So yes, I think it is important and highly useful to be able to speak another language. You learn all about phonics too and you are more receptive to other languages etc etc. As far as I'm concerned, it's all good.

Spanish I think Rhu......
People fail to appreciate that you must use it or lose it though.

I have a French degree,have lived in France and spend lots of time there as my sister has a French dh and four bilingual kids.
I still consider my French to be unacceptably bad however.

Out of interest, what do other MNers kids do at Secondary school??
The school I work at splits the year group in half - half do French & half do German - the kids have no say in the matter, its just done by allocating the classes to one or the other.

There are difficult things about Mandarin, in particular the writing, obviously, where you just have to learn each character, and the tones (each syllable can be said with four tones - rising, falling etc. - though I think there are seven tones in Cantonese Chinese), but there are also easy things. Script can be anglicised ("pinyin"), which makes understanding of pronunciation easier, and you could learn to speak it without being able to read and write it properly, and they don't have tenses in the same way that we do, which makes sentence construction easier. I don't know any kids who are learning it though.

Spanish? Really? Oooh you're right an' all! And Mandarin is the most widely spoken language so there is a use for it then!

I do think that if they learn a second language they don't just learn that language, it opens up your mind to other subjects such as phonics and accents, body language, culture and of course it does make it easier to speak another language on top of that!

However with all the pressure on kids today, I wouldn't push them with extra tuition in another language so young. What I would like to see however is languages taught in schools from reception age.

I'll try to keep this brief:

1. It's simply not true that "English is universal language". most companies in other countries have someone who speaks english, but they may not actually know anything about the product or whatever. Small comapnies may well not have anyone who speaks english.

1. never mind competing with graduates, learning a language is good for the brain on so many other levels. It would be worth learning even if international businbess did not exist. to learn another language properly is to be taught another way to think.

1. It's about bloody time frankly.

Marina: the thing about languages is that usually a native speaker with a good text book and a bit of practice is better than a really experienced teacher who is not a native speaker. I dunno...

DD(3) is a huge Dora fan and speaks odd words of Spanish, in context throughout the day - which I try and encourage with additional words which I learned when at school (way back in the late 80's).
I think Spanish is one of the easier languages however.

And speaking of school, to back up SP's point we had a native German speaker teach us german, and it was great because instead of the usual crappy monotone sentences he actualy bought passion and sense to the language and was able to educate us about Germany as well, which was a bonus!

'The UK government's Department for Education reported in 2006 that 47 percent of school children left school at age 16 without having achieved a basic level in functional maths, and 42 percent fail to achieve a basic level of functional English.' This is what I find shocking, if a bit of a thread hijack. My own experience of learning languages at school (didn't learn much, how could I when most of lesson conducted in English) and my experience of learning abroad (speak two foreign languages fluently) makes me wonder what we should be focusing on in schools and how we should change the way that modern languages are taught.

What do we want to achieve by teaching them? Fluency? Accuracy? Communication? Or the joy of the study of a language? Ds' French teacher wrote on his report that 'French is a language that requires accuracy' I was tempted to write back that I personally think that communication is the issue and as such, accuracy is not such a big deal. I have simply never met any English school child who could actually speak a language with any degree of proper fluency and as for their pronunciation!

No, neither Spanish or French is the second most widely spoken languages after Mandarin Chinese and English... here is a chart I found on the internet:

Language Number of Speakers
Mandarin 885m
Hindi 375m
Spanish 358m
English 347m
Arabic 211m
Bengali 210m
Portuguese 178m
Russian 165m
Japanese 125m
German 100m
French 77m
Malay-Indonesian 58m

So, why so many English people prefer to learn French (nothing against French or the French - I speak French too and love France), I don't understand.... Perhaps because they are our neighbours...?

Learning foreign languages is more about speaking another language - it actually helps other mental skills. We are raising our children bilingually and, having been concerned that they may find English school difficult, they are actually amongst the best in reading and writing in English in their class (and they are not particularly bright - just average).
So, I do think foreign languages in the UK should be compulsory in primary school. And can we please have more options than French...!?

Yes, I'd really like at least one of them to learn Arabic.

As well as French, German, Spanish, Italian and the other usual suspects.

Hello Marina, we always seem to end up bumping into each other on these primary language threads don't we!!

Not sure if people remember but I was really keen to get into primary MFL (am secondary trained)but there are just no openings up here. Most primaries are training their existing teachers rather than taking on language specialists. I've been very lucky as I've managed to get a French teaching post in one of the few middle schools round here. It's so much more enjoyable than in secondary but I do still feel that the links between primary/middle/ secondary are going to have to be much improved if any real progress is going to be made.

Senora, I'd be happy with a native language speaker too, very much so
But that's not what they're getting in our local schools in my part of London. It's usually a TA with an o level or GCSE of several years rustiness armed with a Dora book - no-one's offering French locally as it's too hard to brush up on quickly, apparently. And we are right off the Jolie Ronde radar round here too.
I think they should be getting more native-speaker student assistants in, as they did in my days at grammar school. My real interest in French, a language I can still write and read fluently and converse in pretty well 20 years after I took my degree, was kindled properly by the fascinating assistantes we had in my teens. We even had someone originally from Laos (but also from Le Mans and Clermont Ferrand, more prosaically)
We were so spoiled. Every year my school had an assistante and a lektorin, plus a Polish-born Russian conversation assistant. Spanish was actually the only MFL where we didn't import someone and I am not sure why that was

Salut Sarah! It's a bit of a hobbyhorse for us both isn't it

MrsPG, I think the problem with Arabic might be that it is a very dialect-specific group of languages rather than one standard version...which to learn IYSWIM?

Whether or not it's important(not too sure myself), I thought it might actually be fun to try and learn some French or Spanish with DS. Or maybe that's a stupid idea. Slightly off the subject, has anyone tried the BBC Muzzy language course with a toddler? Have heard it's meant to be good, but vastly expensive.