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!

At Birmingham, we wrote essays in English in y1 and y2. We wrote a 6000 word extended essay on a topic of our choosing in Russian during our year abroad (the idea was to make use of access to local people, materials, resources for our research). Then final year was a mix of essays in English and Russian. Dissertation was in English.

@LoobyLott Don’t just tag me! Lots of us are saying the views of the poster are not correct. Like most degrees, MFL grads obtain a range of salaries. Others are saying exactly the same as me. We all know grads can get great jobs with a MFL degree and for me, happiness at work matters too.

@TenSheds The issue to be faced is that a uk MFL degree is not just about learning a language in the way you suggest. It’s about 30% that. So you cannot get the remaining 70% without the degree. For many it’s the 70% that makes them employable and not just the 30%. It’s not a vocational degree and hasn’t been for as long as anyone can remember. However it’s a degree offered by the most elite universities and I am not going to accept these graduates are inferior.

People without much money don’t take gap years before a 4 year degree. It’s a complete luxury. Many dc, including mine, just wanted to get on with it. She had 3 further years of studying/training post degree and did actually want to earn money instead of spending ours. Most bright dc don’t need a gap year either.

Don't tell me what to do or drag me into your rage-fest. You're always having a go at people and at the same time talking about it takes all sorts. Have a little humanity please.

Don’t tag me then! I’m happy to ignore you. Just stop tagging me. I can also talk passionately if I want to.

I couldn't disagree more with this entire post. Since university, I haven't used a single iota of the actual content of my four year classics degree once, apart from in crosswords and pub quizzes. But I've used the skills I developed on my degree course every day of my career since then - and the time I spent immersing myself in a subject I loved was very precious. I consider those four years the very opposite of a waste of time and money. I also radically disagree with the idea that sport and music have to be done to a high level to make them meaningful. I think that the experience of participation in things like sport and music is hugely valuable (and can be genuinely transformational) even at quite humble levels. I sing (fairly badly) in a choir and it brings me some of the greatest joy in my life. I've seen my own kids and others around them experience the same.

Your views on education appear to be entirely transactional rather than experiential and based only on mathematically measurable outcomes. I'll continue to encourage my kids to pursue the subjects that interest them, rather than spending three years taking a degree they don't want to do in pursuit of a possible X% salary uplift. No doubt I'm consigning them to a pointless finishing school experience. But hey, I'll take that risk. Life is short.

@tobyj Well said. I have one DD earning 10 times what the other one has been. They both like what they do. Not everyone wants or can achieve high earnings but MFL won’t hold anyone back and can give a lot of pleasure. My DD1 sings too. It gives her a lot of joy. It’s always a good release from work. Sport for all is better than no sport at all.

I've just come back to this thread and want to start by stating that I don't buy the notion that an MFL degree is somehow a lesser beast than other humanitues degrees. As a fluent speaker of Italian, with neglected but good French, a smattering of German and Russian, as a lover of Latin and as a former teacher of English as a Foreign Language, and with a DD in her final year of French at Oxford, I'm going to throw in a few random, unrelated thoughts about language learning in the UK.

It's a shame that the teaching of Latin in state schools is dying on its feet. Learning a language is supported hugely by properly understanding grammatical structures, verb conjugation, gender, and the sequence of tenses. Without the framework these provide for making sense of what you are being taught, students in the early stages of language learning are reduced to learning lists of words in a vain attempt to encourage them to communicate something meaningful.

State schools teach languages in a functional way, aiming to make it fun for students, and with an eye on GCSE results, the E-Bacc (may its soul rest in peace) and Progress 8. Within those straitened confines, there is little room for the rigour and breadth that characterised language teaching in the 1970s and 1980s. DD did her GCSEs at a high achieving comprehensive then went to an independent sixth form on a music scholarship. She realised within the first week that her classmates in French who had been at the school throughout had been much better taught than she had and that she had a lot of catching up to do. At home, when she was in Y10 and Y11, she and I had done a fair amount of work on tenses, auxiliary verbs, conjugations, the gerund, past participles and conditional clauses, none of which had even been introduced at school. Without that, she would have been even further behind once she started A level. In sixth form, once the medics who thought A level French might be an easy fourth A level had dropped out (because it wasn't easy), there remained only one other pupil in the class besides her. So with languages as with classics, music and sport, pupils with parents who can afford to pay get a head start.

As well as wrecker Blair, we also have wrecker Gove, whose reforms squeezed creative subjects to the margins of the secondary curriculum. Music, by training the ear, can, like Latin, be a foundation discipline for languages, particularly the spoken language.

DDs close friendship group at university are materials scientists. In their first year, they teased her as a modern linguist, saying hers was an easy degree. Now that they've seen the texts she is reading, gained some insight into the concepts she has to discuss in tutorials twice a week, tried to understand something about linguistics, and followed some of her more challenging adventures in France, they have changed their minds. They acknowledge that while DD is not able to understand and do what they do, they do not have the aptitude to understand and do what she does.

"DDs close friendship group at university are materials scientists. In their first year, they teased her as a modern linguist, saying hers was an easy degree. Now that they've seen the texts she is reading, gained some insight into the concepts she has to discuss in tutorials twice a week, tried to understand something about linguistics, and followed some of her more challenging adventures in France, they have changed their minds. They acknowledge that while DD is not able to understand and do what they do, they do not have the aptitude to understand and do what she does."

At universities in the UK there are science (and other) undergraduates who are already trilingual or more when they start their degree. They have already had "adventures in France", they have been educated in several languages at school etc. They can work in labs in other languages during their summer holidays. Whereas language undergraduates cannot access the science the other way round.

Latin and Music are fine in themselves but they don't develop transferable skills that help young people learn foreign languages. If you want to learn French grammar, you need to learn French grammar. If you want to pronounce French correctly, you need to read French aloud and work those mouth muscles. Etc

This thread is about Higher Education ie young people so I was answering your question within that perspective.

Language learning is always best done in immersive conditions but there really are myriad possibilities and it is IME impossible to give generic answers to older adults without doing a full diagnosis of their situation.

Again, disagree. As a classicist who also did two modern languages, I can tell you that study of Latin is immensely useful as a scaffold for MFL learning and also for English (classicists tend to be extremely good at spelling and writing English). Latin also produces lots of transferable skills in areas such as research, reasoning, attention to detail, writing, communication etc (not only through the language itself but also through the cultural study that surrounds it - as with MFL). Some of those skills might seem nebulous, but they're important. I work with people who have a vast range of degree types, but the most senior people most commonly have humanitirs degrees. The reason those people achieve and perform well in senior roles is because of those more nebulous skills - things like judgment, nuance, communication. I'm not saying for a moment that STEM students don't have those skills - that would be ridiculous - but I do think that humanities subjects develop those skills particularly well.

As for your point about all these trilingual scientists with their adventures in France - they might exist, but they're by and large not a product of the British school system. If language teaching at school in the UK was at a level to regularly produce students who are talented linguists alongside their primary subjects, then I might think your point had more weight. But sadly, the decimation of MFL teaching in UK schools is one thing I totally agree with you about (and it was never that great in the first place).

You can tell me whatever you like but language research is perfectly clear!

One of my uncles spent a year in Germany before doing a Chemistry degree. He later qualified in a profession and worked a lot in Germany, in German, with clients. His career was infinitely better for having learned German on top of Chemistry. Had he done an MFL degree he would not ever have had the professional career in science that he did.

@IdaGlossop so many MFL teachers get their dc to Oxbridge. My DD had no help whatsoever from her parents! None. She started one MFL in y7 and the other in y8 from scratch. I do think dc who can do this with no outside help are well taught but even at a private school her French teachers were a mixed bag. In y11 the teacher told them they were behind but my dd did what was required without any outside help.

Many Oxbridge MFL undergraduates have been educated in at least one of the languages they are studying and/or have a parent or grandparent native speaker.

@TizerorFizz Oh, I'm with you on the greater scope of a MFL degree (and limitations on gap years); I just thought I'd see if Ceramiq had any insights about the language side. Because lifelong learning is a thing, and may increase in future with access to study funding models. Working in a field in a language other than that in which you were schooled will inevitably require additional learning to grasp specialist terminology. Certainly higher education isn't just for school leavers.

@TenShedsI agree about life long learning. People with responsibilities can hardly drop them though. My DHs aunt had Italian lessons in her 60s. She just wanted to understand more when she went to Italy. I belong to the U3A locally and we have Latin, French and Spanish MFL groups. As I don’t have an O level in any MFL so know it’s not for me. My brain doesn’t work like that. Dh and me were amazed when dd was good at MFLs. She is not like us: her dad is an engineer. However I do think many people find MFLs very difficult and drop them as soon as possible. Instead of saying our degrees are not good enough, I would praise any dc who actually gets a MFL degree (especially with no parental, gap year or numerous holidays help!).

@TizerorFizz "As I don’t have an O level in any MFL so know it’s not for me. My brain doesn’t work like that."

As you don't have any personal experience of MFL acquisition or plurilingualism, it is odd that you are quite so firm in your beliefs about MFL acquisition.

My education stopped at O levels, I achieved 4 of them, one included French but that’s really by the by. I don’t believe I’m a total muppet though (subjective I know)! These threads I hope, remain inclusive to all with their various experiences, lived in and via DC, family, work experiences, recruitment etc.

You are one opinion amongst many @Ceramiq, no matter how experienced you think you are, it’s still just one. Yours.

@Ceramiq Since when is mn just an echo chamber for those “in the know” who are self appointed experts? I do know the route my DD took! I do know her friends and others who have taken MFLs and one who gave up at university and didn’t persevere. I know enough to have an opinion and I do know the benefits of the MFL degrees from the better universities. This is MN, not a “expert” forum for one single opinion of those who have assumed a position of spokesperson for MFL learning. We are allowed to have different experiences without being told we are not good enough to hold them. This is typical of some people though. So my thoughts and experiences (of definitely crap teaching) are valid.

Most of what you say contributes to dc not continuing with MFLs. Why bother when everyone else is better, better taught and have learnt multiple MFLs from birth? Also spending time abroad is very expensive and makes the school to job gap at least 5 years. It’s not worth it for many. Im struggling to think of anyone who had that luxury in my day. Im struggling to think of many from lower wage households who could even think of it now. The difficulties are obvious for many who are starting MFLs from scratch and succeeding is hard. Why can you just not applaud dc who keep going against the odds?

I have decades of experience in MFL acquisition and read all the research. There are such things as informed opinions.

@ealingwestmum The problem is that we “lowly” folk are not good enough on a HE forum! I welcome our opinions.

Please don't mis-state my opinions. I am very much in favour of MFL but it is IMO a complete waste of personal and national resources for DC to undertake an MFL degree with no intention of taking those languages further. A luxury, finishing school attitude.

Language degrees aren't valued. Language proficiency tests are more recognised

@1SillySossij Says who? You? What about jobs that don’t require MFL proficiency? There’s many that don’t and the degree is better.

Completely!

Standardised testing, be that at university entrance level, Masters or graduate recruitment, is constantly making inroads into assessment and displacing traditional measures of skills such as high school leaving examinations and degrees. That is of course not to say that school and university do not impart valuable skills that can only be honed over time: of course they do. But assessment of the validity of those skills in specific conditions is increasingly done by high-performance standardised testing that also allows for people to demonstrate skills acquired outside the mainstream educational framework, sometimes rather better than within it.