Yet another university pulling Modern Languages degrees

[tadjennyp]

Just seen on the news that Leicester is pulling its MFL degrees despite students having accepted offers. Are languages becoming the preserve of prestigious universities with very high tariffs? What hope do students in sixth forms in schools with low prior attainment have of going to university to study a language? I am feeling quite demoralised as an MFL teacher. What can we do to prevent the decline? And no, google translate does not do the same job as a person being able to converse with confidence.

I think the removal of the requirement to teach MFL to 16 in 2004 is a bit of a red herring. By accident of year of birth I am part of the few short years when it was compulsory. I have a GCSE in german. At my school a significant number of pupils did 'non-exam' languages. The requirement was fufilled by a couple of language periods a week. Rightly or wrongly they weren't offered the exam as it was considered very unlikely they would pass and the time was spent on key skills/pre-vocational skills etc.

My DD has just taken her options in Y9. Students must do an MFL, geography or history. The vast, vast majority of students have chosen a humanity with history being the most popular by some margin. It is interesting as neither history or MFL is commonly directly vocational. In some ways an MFL could be considered more directly 'useful' than history.
I think it is a mixture of two things. Rightly or wrongly MFLs are considered hard. Also sadly it seems people are becoming more insular. Connecting with other cultures isn't always valued.

When students have chosen an MFL it is nearly always in addition to a humanity rather than instead.

Idk enough about this. Dd has 5 offers for 4 universities - Manchester (2 languages), Birmingham (MFL and MFL with business), Liverpool (2 languages) and Newcastle (MFL).

She’s decided against Newcastle now anyway. I advised her against Sheffield due to finances.

Can you or anyone else tell me more about these universities and whether you think they’ll continue the courses longer term please? Liverpool seems to have quite a large offering on dual 2 language degrees or 75/25. Birmingham seems really set up for languages as well.

Me too, except that my language GCSE was French. I remember moaning that it wasn't fair that the previous year group didn't have to take a language GCSE. We could take French, German or both.

A minority of our year group got to study Italian (or French). They were those in the lower language sets who were taking a non-GCSE language course. I quite fancied learning Italian! At least it gave them a bit of scarcity value.

Because a decent MFL programme will not be about the language/s acquisition alone. This seems to be a fixation for many that don't know what the degree actually entails.

An employable degree, if not vocational (like medicine or similar), not sure this is as clear cut as implied in an employment constrained market.

Employable as in STEM, economics, medicine, law etc

What makes you think that?
The EU isn't out of bounds.
Despite the self-harm of Brexit, plenty of people without an EU passport still live and work in the EU and millions more visit it!

The skills of the individual are more important than the degree itself, other than when a subject is specifically requested; they all go through the same recruitment funnel. Some will be better equipped than others.

HE funding has been on a decline for years. But when Brexit meant EU students came less often. The newer international that came often paid more.

So if she's competing for a job say, as an English teacher in a French language school she won't have an advantage over the candidate who needs a visa?

What about if there are few graduate jobs? Wouldn't it be nicer to work a supermarket checkout in the South of France than in the UK?

Having a good level of French AND an EU passport just gives you more choices than only having the one.

If everyone here loves the EU so much why didn't you move there when you had the chance?

Brexit is not to blame! 🤣🤣
Modern tech, AI etc is to ‘blame’

There are languages outside the EU

Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean.

Russian was very popular for a while until the war.

Snap, my DD did the same and she’s now studying two languages at Uni, one ab initio another she’d done for A Level. She spent a year out before Uni in her A Level language now is spending her Year Abroad in her ab initio language. Neither of me or DH are linguists and jsut British. DD got A stars in both but DS who took one MFL at A level - he got an A - as predicted by his teacher when he was choosing A levels - just doesn’t have same the attention to detail that excellent language proficiency demands.

C1 exams are great qualifications but different to a languages degree. All depends what you want. DD took C1 in her A Level language while an au pair before heading to Uni and has just taken C1 in her ab initio language while overseas. In October she’s back to Uni for her final year.

I’d liken a Languages degree more akin to reading English Literature but all the material is in a foreign language. May not be popular but is definitely hard work. DD had 16 hrs contact time each week so good value. And DD loves the breadth of literature she’s studying and concepts of feminism, social issues etc over time in different cultures. And a languages degree remains a good training for those going on to do Law. Lots of barristers have studied languages.

I lived there for 10 years. Dh is French. We are both dual nationals now ‘thanks to’ Brexit. Lots of reasons why people can’t.

It's very sad. Lots of schools are ditching MFL A Level courses too. I teach at a girls' grammar where we still offer 3 languages and we get quite a few coming to us for 6th form because their schools aren't running language A Level.

We still have pretty small A Level classes, but a high proportion of them do languages at uni. We probably have the highest ratio of Oxbridge applicants too.

But the Head has just made languages non-compulsory at GCSE

So amazing that you still teach three languages. But if even a grammar school is making languages optional, what hope do those of us in rural secondaries have? What a shame.

Sorry all I meant to post earlier but then didn;t get the chance. So the chat has moved on but I wanted to answer @Cheeseandquince as best I can.

Firstly I want to say that I am not in any sense a font of knowledge on these matters. For sure I take an interest and I keep up with any news stories, and my former colleagues and I share intel, but I don’t really know any more than is out there in the media, plus the occasional in-secondary rumour.

Tbh no, I have not heard anything specific about York wrt MFL courses. I have heard the stories others will have seen about redundancies there, but that’s true of an awful lot of unis.

I would say the unis I have heard about where MFL is at risk or is being cut are Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester (as we see) and Aberdeen. You can still study MFL at Aberdeen but no longer single hons. Lancaster as I say is another where I would be wary. Loughborough has not offered MFL for quite a few years but it certainly used to (as a good teacher friend of mine studied MFL there) – I reckon it must have dropped MFL 10-15 years ago tho.

Some of this is rumours and speculation but when you are planning the next four years of your life and running up £50k+ in debt you want to be sure you can complete the course.

@Piggywaspushed the reason I say I would be wary of Lancaster is bc all it offers now is its BA languages and global cultures, but until this year it offered a lot more MFL-based joint hons degrees, such as BA French and politics or history or film or maths or linguistics, ditto German and Spanish. I don’t mean to cast shade on what may be an excellent course and I agree LAncaster is a great uni, but when a uni rationalises several courses like that it rings alarm bells for me.

But I don’t think people should panic – I am sure many of the most popular unis will continue to run MFL courses; the fact that we are so worried about this from Leicester indicates that it is not the norm, at least not yet.

and to those commenting about competition from native speakers at DD and DS's school the native speakers in their school often ended up with A rather than A star as they'd picked up sloppy habits and didn't put the work in. Rather like taking English Literature A level - being an English native speaker doesn't guarantee you an A star...

It's still worth considering an unusual (for Brits) language if your dc can manage that eg Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic. Sure a company can hire native speakers but it's impressive to find a Brit who can charm overseas clients or suppliers by speaking their language.

Visas can cost a fortune for the year abroad by the way (the translations and legalisation).

dd did three GCSE languages and two A level and now two at university including one of the above more challenging ones. Time will tell if she gets a job. Not sure. People always seem impressed she speaks the languages she does and I hope it helps for international business roles.

Absolutely this, as per my previous posts! It’s very frustrating that people are posting who have no idea what a language degree actually entails.

🙄

This is awful. I think a lot stems for lack of secondary language teachers, very poor of non-existent GCSE teaching and v few doing a language A level. DC is doing one and this is very rare from his secondary. That said 18 in his sixth form class, which gives some hope.

18 in an A level MFL class is amazing! Great work by someone at the school.

Agree btw with those saying a degree in MFL is so much more than learning the language. It amazes me that people think that is all there is to studying MFL. As if to get a degree in Eng lit all you had to do was read a bit of Dickens and Austen.

Yeah I was surprised they had so many in a comprehensive. The teaching is excellent so I think a lot of the pre-16 DC must carry on. Then a few randoms like my DC.