MFL degrees - single vs dual language

[tobyj]

DS is edging slowly towards degree course choice, and has decided on MFL. He was considering joint honours (language and classics or language and history), but has decided to stick with straight MFL. Next decision is whether to a) just take a single language (German), or b) take German plus a semi ab initio (he did French GCSE so could pick that back up) or c) take German plus a fully ab initio (eg Italian or another European language).

Ultimately he just needs to go with what he wants of course, but I wondered if the MN hive mind had any pearls of wisdom or things to consider - or indeed any uni/course recommendations or ones to avoid? First time going through this, and feeling a bit rabbit in the headlights!

I should have added @tobyj re your update, very best of luck to your DS in progressing his interests, including teaching which is clearly much needed!

<reads cerqmiq's reply>
<gives up>

@Namechange101again Surprised at Durham re 2 grades. DD was out of Oxford for 1 grade in non MFL subject. Bad day at the office! Has not made any difference to anything though.

@Ceramiq So my intellectually thick DD managed to become a very good barrister earning a hell of a lot after a MFL degree! How? You are just WRONG.

Why? Specifics please.

I would ease up a bit. Your DD has obviously achieved great things. Ceramiq is just putting in her tuppence worth based on her own experience. It's not a direct personal attack on you or your DD.

Also - it’s not remotely necessary to stay fluent!! Who cares? The degree is a door opener. It’s a starting point for very many careers: many of which don’t require fluency. They might require other skills. This ridiculous notion that MFL is vocational will not go away.

It’s true that if you want to teach in a school, Spanish and French are the best options. That’s because you won’t have to do further MFL learning. The other strength of doing a more unusual language that’s not our alphabet is, in my view, you are probably very bright! It’s hard unless you are half Russian or have learnt Japanese from birth. Why anyone thinks learning these languages and doing academic work based on literature and culture is some sort of doddle is beyond me. Totally beyond me!

A friend of mine did Arabic and worked as a translator for the Ministry of Defence.

Alphabets are really easy to learn. Phonics (sound-letter equivalences) work just as well for any alphabet system and require no special intelligence.

The point about gaining fluency is that resources (state and personal) are invested in gaining that fluency and not in other things. There is a massive opportunity cost to devoting time to language learning (which is not easy). If then the language fluency is lost, it's as if the student hadn't learned the language in the first place. Lose-lose.

A lot of it is down to opportunity cost: the time spent on language acquisition (which is something small children do ie not intellectually heavy weight and not requiring serious thinking) is not time spent on doing hard stuff. My experience of recent MFL graduates is that their English essay writing and speaking skills are significantly weaker than those of other humanities graduates (who are usually pretty impressive writers/speakers). This is not really surprising, given that non-MFL graduates are totally immersed in highly complex English for their degree years in a way that MFL graduates are not.

Few MFL undergraduate degrees teach beyond what is taught at 18 (ie high school) level in literature/philosophy/history in France/Germany/Italy etc.

@Ceramiq I am not sure what your experience of MFL graduates is. However, it surely depends on the individual student.

We recruit up to a hundred graduates a year (from all subject disciplines) in the large organisation I work for and some graduates are very able from the start and others need extra time. You would not be able to distinguish between them based on their degree subject alone.

Oxford MFL undergraduates write all their essays in English, on the basis that writing in a language not your mother tongue restricts the complexity of what they are able to express. Does anyone know if other university language departments do this? I can see the sense in it, but also the risk of written fluency in the language(s) of study being reduced.

My experience is that it's quite common for a majority of essays to be written in English rather than in the MFL under study. And, yes, I agree that this reduces the amount of a student's time practising writing in MFL and is also an admission of the failure of undergraduates to achieve a high standard of written fluency in their MFL.

I think if it’s a pathway students wish to take, it is also important for them to assess whether where their study offer is commensurate with their academic aspirations, the cost/benefit TO THEM. This thread is after all, about an OP’s son who may wish to go into MFL teaching. No two MFL faculties are the same, some will forge greater connections with partner universities/Industry than others, some won’t care less what they do with their year abroad, and so on. And we all know top grade A/IB students that choose to coast through HE, not unique to just MFL, it is not pleasant watching any UG jumping through hoops to get on first rung right now but there will be those that dig down and know where/how they may add value to the workplace.

But I don’t recognise the profile personally @Ceramiq you put out, not because I don’t believe it exists, it is just not prevalent in the peer group my DD is in. She may have got lucky, but their output is robust, solid in their degree competencies and most certainly they hold their own amongst their native peers in class and beyond.

Obviously there are MFL students who do extremely well and end up competent in the languages they study. But overall the direction of travel in terms of degree quality has been downwards for a long time - there are myriad statistics and data points to back that up. Meanwhile, there are plenty of plurilingual students (London universities are chock a block with them) who do degrees in other subjects and graduate with both high level language skills and skills in Economics, Law, History of Art or whatever who will be far better equipped on the labour market than someone who is only around C1 level in one or two MFL. This is why I question the wisdom of undertaking a MFL degree if students are not rich and if they do not have particular access to the MFLs in question to bolster the rather lacklustre courses on offer at many universities.

Ds has had to write essays in English, German and Japanese (not at either Oxford or Cambridge as he wasn't interested in their courses and couldn't do Japanese with German).

He is thrilled to have done his last German essay in German, and is now concentrating on his dissertation which is, unsurprisingly, in English and is on a complex bit of German history. For his time in Germany he had to write all essays in German, and also took Japanese while he was there so he didn't get rusty, so for Japanese he was going from German to Japanese and back to German every day. That's quite a discipline when your first language is English. In Japan everything was taught in Japanese and written in kanji, not English (two hours of compulsory homework a night is set at Japanese universities) which would be a shock to many a UK student. At his uni, the contact hours for MFL are the highest after Medicine and Dentistry.

He started German in Y7, none of us speak German at home, and now speaks and writes it fluently. He started Japanese four years ago and now knows something in the region of 20,000 kanji (considered to be the number required to read a newspaper such as the Japanese equivalent of The Times), and he had to do essays in Japanese when in Japan. He speaks it to an accomplished conversational level, fluency being considered hard to achieve in Japanese without far longer immersion. There are roughly 50,000 kanji plus hirigana and katakana so it's a lot to cover. He does not speak what would be considered 'formal' Japanese (which is what they speak in the recent Shogun adaptation) as UK universities mostly don't teach that because it's starting to die out in a slowly less formalised Japanese society. He reads Japanese books, and watches anime so actually uses and hears Japanese more often than he does German, but communicates with the friends he made in each country in both.

I can't see any of that reducing written fluency, and I also can't see where four years of that fails in a calculation of academic rigour. The changes that have come about with the year abroad, where many students now attend university in their language countries, rather than working, mean they probably do more essays in their languages, now, than they used to.

It's a depressing line of thought that some follow: "the English teach languages shockingly badly, no one progresses above A level standard during their time at university, it's a total waste of time as they will earn no money and be in lots of debt". The English way - shout loudly, people will understand, we don't need to speak their lingo. Given the levels of fluency amongst his friends who have taken various combinations of languages, I'd say the fluency/A level standard argument is totally spurious.

He may, or may not, use his German in the future, depends if he does go in to teaching. He will undoubtedly use his Japanese as he is back there in the not too distant future, post graduation, and will continue to read and watch Japanese output as well.

Like others on this thread with children who have done MFL, I'm very proud of how he has learned and developed over the last four years, in both languages and resilience (Germany was a bureaucratic nightmare and dealing with that in German was... character building...). I don't care one jot if he isn't as good at Japanese or German when he gets to the age of 90, as someone's granny who went to Cambridge and still read her Proust aged 106. I won't be around to care after all.

"It's a depressing line of thought that some follow: "the English teach languages shockingly badly, no one progresses above A level standard during their time at university, it's a total waste of time as they will earn no money and be in lots of debt". The English way - shout loudly, people will understand, we don't need to speak their lingo. Given the levels of fluency amongst his friends who have taken various combinations of languages, I'd say the fluency/A level standard argument is totally spurious."

That's absolutely not my position (if you think it is). I am an ardent defender of modern language acquisition. My issue is with the way time and money are wasted in the English education system (secondary and HE) teaching languages very badly at great opportunity cost to students. There are far easier and better ways to learn languages, immersively. It is precisely because I want people to love and learn MFL that I disagree with the attitude of those who find it unimportant that students do not carry their MFL degree languages forward after graduation. Lots of people in the UK in high earning and interesting jobs use languages every day but they by and large learned those languages outside the education system.

I know it’s not the point of this thread but the feeling I’m left with is what’s the point of any enrichment beyond core academia, why learn musical instruments, play sport to elite levels etc. That’s the whole point of MFL, you get to bolt on a love of something you have (innate or learned, either works). Pretty much everything is use or lose in life, including basic skills like drawing, writing, practice makes everything improve?

Being multi (or plurilingual) is of course, a bonus. But I dont think it’s enough to develop an inferior complex over. There’s a reason why many job posts require a non-specified degree entry; there may be higher success conversions from other subjects but it doesn’t exclude strong MFL candidates, in fact it’s pretty much level playing once you are in the early hands of automated, information blind recruitment, especially where applying for roles where soft skills are paramount.

Give me an interesting YP any day.

Exactly: MFL, like sports, music, drawing are vitally important and need to be done to a high standard to make them meaningful. You don't actually forget them if you learn them properly (though they do get a bit rusty and need some brush up input if you haven't used them recently). Undertaking a university degree in something you intend not to forget subsequently is a shocking waste of time and money.

What a fabulous combination @mimbleandlittlemy, best wishes in whatever he does next.

If like a pp's son a student has learned Japanese or similarly difficult languages (and they are objectively assessed as trickier for Europeans) then as a recruiter I'd be impressed by the resilience and perseverance that showed in itself and I would assume they were pretty clever. I would not make that assumption about a young person who had a family background that meant they were bilingual.

But if a grade 5 child violinist is able to enjoy adult orchestral inclusion in later years, happy to sit at 3rd desk, who are we to judge whether their learning, the cost, time and effort was worth it, if not achieving a high diploma and beyond level of play?

Or if their memories are ‘I used to play’, so what?

Meaningful is subjective. Thankfully.

Two of my relatives did degrees in Chinese. For one of them at least it was the challenge of learning Chinese that appealed above all else. She's in her 60s now and had to retrain late in life for another career because her First in Chinese from Cambridge had no marketable applications on the labour market. My younger relative who did a degree in Chinese (at an Australian university) and spent an inordinate amount of time at it is also at a career crossroads. The opportunity cost of learning hard languages is very real.

No university degree was wasted in this example. Children do lots of extra curriculars and that's great and hardly analogous to devoting one's undergraduate degree to something that one doesn't intend to take forward ie is a luxury / finishing school choice.

I think many people end up at career cross roads. I don’t want to get drawn into any sector rabbit hole but I don’t think Middle Aged medics are the happiest bunnies right now.