Children to learn a foreign language at age seven.

[Psammead]

BBC link here

Good-o.

I think learning a language helpS with enriching knowledge of one's own language. I think this is the best news I have heard for a long time.

Dowagershump - you could be talking about me. I have grade A A-level French (before the days of A*) and I can't hold a conversation in it. I actually think it's got worse since my day as well - GCSE language papers no longer even seem to require you to translate a passage from English into the foreign language, or vice versa.

And yet for my work I often have to talk to business people from other countries (Germany, India, Israel - all sorts) and so many of them speak absolutely fluent English. In Denmark, almost everyone seems to be bilingual. It's humbling. I would love to know how these countries do it.

The other issue with language learning is that British children have virtually 0 knowledge of their own grammar. So it makes it really hard for us MFL teachers to teach them about pronouns, verbs, tenses etc.
As MFL teachers we get a regular bashing as to the quality of our teaching, and clearly some of us are dire. However, the country's attitude towards languages is often quite negative and this does not help children to be motivated to learn and work hard at them. Students who are prepared to work hard and come form a background in which they value languages, do well at languages.
It is also worth mentioning that most of us are expected to teach more than one language so as a result, we end up teaching a language that we are not specialist in, not out of choice.

Oh yes, and the other thing is exposure to the language. A lot of people in the world are exposed to English via music and cinema, hence facilitating English language learning.
Equally, I think it is unrealistic to expect people to be fluent in a language after an A Level, let alone a GCSE. But yes, otherwise, they should be able to get by.

My DC's state primary learn Spanish from YR? They have been doing this for the last 5/6 years, is this really that new?

My Y3 DS2 can ask simple questions, my DS1 is fluent enough to hold a conversation in Spanish. The school has excellent provision for MFL, and all the teachers had classes, and two spoke fluent Spanish and they 'float' round the classes when they do the language lessons.

I think it's hit and miss though, the school down the road does no language at all.

According to my favourite newspaper 'Primary schools could offer lessons in Mandarin, Latin and Greek as well as French, German and Spanish.'

Blimey, I hope they're going to pay for our evening classes!

Couthy - well good on your school.

My dh is at a hugely multiculural school but they can't get the teachers so they learn a bit of this and that every year.

So annoying because my family has four languages between us (but family live far away) but ds needs to learn his dfather's language (as they don't speak english) but dh hasn't bothered to teach him. Such a waste.

My ideal scenario would be that ds's school would offer one asian language the entire way through primary (or at a push portuguese). I don't see this happening however.

Cory's post is the most interesting to me. Cory - your dkids experience was so different from your experience and do you think that it's because we have such and abundance of languages in certain parts of the UK that if your kid doesn't have any they wouldn't know where to start?

There is very little point introducing MFL at 7, if it is not going to be taken seriously by both schools and parents.

The former must have meaningful time and resources to give to it. The later must understand that a fair amount of work at home is necessary to make any real progress.

I think it is a good thing, esp if the same language is carried throughout KS1, 2 ad 3.

I'm in the Middle East now where EFL is started in preschool.

For this to succeed, each pupil over the age of 7 in a school would need half an hour a day of a language, taught by a language specialist, and for this to continue in high school, rather than starting from scratch. Peripatetic language teachers might be part of the answer. Otherwise, it just won't work, as others have said.

However, languages have been massively undertaught and devalued for at least thirty years so I don't think there are enough language graduates who also have a teaching qualification and want to go into teaching. So unless the government trains more teachers (at a time when they are setting private against public sector workers and interfering with teachers' pay and conditions) this won't work.

What is possible is for languages to be restored to their position as part of the core curriculum at secondary school level and for teachers to go on inservice training courses to boost their language skills and language teaching skills, if necessary. Mandarin and Urdu should be up there with French, German and Spanish, and local community expertise should be drawn on.

Gove's idea should be something to aim for, once we have a good, solid cohort of language graduates again. Except of course that it is now very much more difficult than it was to get into university.

It's a lovely idea but it's not fair to dangle this in front of us when the government have not said how they intend to make it possible for it to happen.

Someone stop Gove from simply repeating the mistakes of the past.

I totally agree woth Solopower.It needs real committment and resources. The notion that anybody can do it is partly the reason language learning is in such a dismal state. Properly trained MFL teachers are needed and using them as peripatetic teachers would be the answer. it also needs to be planned so there is no repetition at secondary. Starting young has many advantages but properly trained teachers with a good grasp of the foreign language is essential.

Totally agree that we won't get better at MFL until we start teaching the grammar of our own language. Much as I like Latin, as a language in its own right, why 'learn more about our own language' through Latin rather than teaching English itself properly? It is very hard to teach the structure of a new language to pupils who know very little about their own and so have few points of comparison.

What will happen in free schools & academies? He can't compel them to abandon their curriculum.

it also needs to be planned so there is no repetition at secondary totally agree. What would a secondary do if all their feeder primaries offered Greek? How many Greek MFL teachers are there? What happens if all the feeders offer different languages? This has to be planned so that there is scope for continuation at secondary.

I'm living in a time warp. If I remember correctly the last government's plans to roll out compulsory languages for every pupil from year 2 onwards were due to come into fruition in September 2010, after advice from the Rose Report. A lot of schools put a lot of time, effort and money into this from 2006 onwards. My MFL secondary department did outreach work to all the feeder primaries.

Then the coalition got into power, threw out the Rose recommendations and compulsory primary languages were no more. Some forward thinking schools kept them going regardless.

I know that the quality of language teaching depended on how it was set up and that already over-stretched primary teachers with no language quals were not in the right position to do this. I also appreciate that not all secondaries had taken account of this and would send some language learned back to the beginning.

However, Mr Gove, this is NOT a new idea. In fact it's just a re-hash of an idea that was starting to make progress and may have managed to work out some of the problems by now if it had just been left to run. How can teachers succeed if the goal posts are continually changed?

Nice idea - but at my ds's school it a teacher per year so a variety of languages which is pointless in my view. My ds is learning 'spanish' this year - I could have taught him in one week what he gets in one year there. Get one language at school and stick to it. I feel so strongly about this to the point I want to suggest to the school that when they are having language tuition I want my ds out of that class to learn his df's community language (at our own expense).

7 is fine - my dgran came over to UK when I was that age and I picked up her community language in no time - but it was the one language.

On the one hand I thank uk kids are beaten up for their lack of knowlege of all languages (can't think of any other country that provides text in other languages in public places at the UK does - and that's loads of languages and which one should you choose?) - but perhaps if schools concentrated on one they'd be the better for it.

Definitely think it's a great idea, but I do think the schools would need to have budgets for a specialist teacher in a given language, rather than expect the primary teachers to be even more all-singing all-dancing than they already have to be. A lot of us just plain lose our foreign language skills when we leave school because we have no need to practice them.

I have a friend from Denmark who spoke English with a soft, posh accent. She said her folks started to teach her English phrases at home, before she started school. English lessons at school went from age 7 until secondary. She might have had a choice whether to carry on with English at secondary, but for her primary education, it was a requirement. She's also fluent in French, Estonian and maybe Italian. But the way she put it, if she didn't learn a foreign language or two, she'd have only 7 million people to speak with, instead of a few billion.

I grew up in Sweden and though we did start English at age 10/11, we didn't start our second MFL until age 13 and our third (for those who did a third) at age 16. We were still expected to reach a high level of competency in our second and third languages, certainly far higher than is expected of British students in their first language.

We were not allowed to drop English in secondary, or indeed in Sixth Form- you had to have English lessons until you went to university.

Cory - sounds tough but maybe thats the way to do it - just the one language.

Perhaps in UK the schools need to identify one language and then bloody stick to it. It seems to be all over the place at present.