Modern Foreign Languages in Primary

[jenroy29]

My dcs (10 and 9) have been enjoying French and German lessons for a few years now, granted it's only 30 mins a week but they both know a number of phrases and really enjoy the role play and other aspects of the lessons. Their school employs a specialist language teacher for these lessons.

I wondered how many other state primary schools provide MFL lessons and what you think your kids get out of it?

I do not think that learning a language once a week for 30 minutes as a child will enable that person, as an adult, to speak the language fluently.

If done well it can encourage children that learning a language is a good thing, that it is fun. Particularly if they can see a benefit from it - even if it is only being able to order their own drinks on holiday in France or communicate with people they meet there.

If we get them interested in Primary school then they are more likely to take languages at A-level when they are in secondary school. Which still does not mean that they can live and work abroad, but it will give them a good start.

My children learnt French in just over a year, but we had to move to Geneva to do so. :)

Learning a language 30 minutes per week I think can only get them interested and keen to learn a language, but it can only do that.

The reason why other nationalities are much better at languages is that it is similarily important as Maths and Science in British schools. In Germany I think they have 3-4 lessons English per week from Y1 (age 6). As well, it is 'cool' to speak English!

I am surprised though that many primary schools introduce 2 languages - in 30 minutes per week?

Other European countries also continue with compulsory languages for longer though. The French are pretty linguistically chauvinistic but they've all got a good grasp of another (usually European) language because it's a compulsory element of the Bac.

I don't think early introduction is going to do anything beyond improve attitudes and giving confidence - both of which are important but don't translate to being more able to live/work abroad. The input needs to be sustained. However that improved attitude and confidence may translate to people taking languages further and increased proficiency across the population.

It should be better coordinated though. Where it seems to be working well the primary schools have talked to the secondary schools about the language they can introduce and got help from teachers there or implemented areawide programs to enable teachers who don't speak the language to deliver lessons and improve their confidence and provided resources.

The schools going it alone, unless they have v dedicated staff or are lucky enough to have a nature speaker/ship in a specialist, are the ones doing less well and we need to be careful about that because the last thing the UK needs is children going off languages earlier!

Is it cool to speak English because of films and music?
Do you think that other countries putting so much importance on English is the reason that we don't (on the whole) consider it as important as other subjects? Makes me think of the comedy sketches where the arrogant Englishman shouts and speaks slowly!

Oh yes, they all listen to English/American music. However, I thing there is great music from other countries too, not so much becomes popular here though.

I just feel it would be much nicer to introduce one language and culture, and being able to hold a basic conversation in that language, rather than learning to say just a few phrases in several languages.

When I learn a language I tend to find it very hard to start with having to lean completely new words and phrases, however, the more I know the easier and more enjoyable it becomes, because I can make connections and do more with the language, e.g. understand a simple story/conversation.

the school my kids went to did french in years 3 and 4, and spanish in 5 and 6.

Not sure what they got out of it because the teachers were not fluent in either language. My dc seemed to enjoy it but didn't really learn much in the nearly 2 years he did french.

We now HE and have dabbled a bit in German and Spanish - and they have learnt a lot of words quite quickly - but we haven't progresses much further yet.

by the way - meant to say I think it is a good thing they do it in schools but would prefer it if they had someone fluent to come in and teach them - I think it would be much more effective.

I think it is a big issue in primary schools that teachers themselves have a very limited grasp of languages, and I feel it's not really fair to just ask them all to teach a language.

DS's teacher (Y1) told me she learned some Spanish over the summer and DS has come home with some Spanish greatings and he can ask 'how are you' but she didn't teach them possible answers. They seem to do that during registration, so lots of repetition.

DS is already German bilingual and enjoys learning some Spanish, I speak it too, which helps. I believe they teach Spanish in his Junior School, but I would hate it if he had a good basic knowledge in that language and then had to drop it in secondary school and start completely different languages.

dds' primary has Italian once a week from Reception upwards, at least in KS1...not sure after that.

dd2 does French in nursery there, but as she's bilingual anyway I've no idea how much impact it has.

People I know who are bilingual always seemed to find learning other languages easier. Maybe hearing different languages early turns something on in the brain.

My children learn a minimal amount of French in their primary. They like it but it's only a tiny pretence at learning a language. Colours, numbers, that's about it. Also I'm aware that the teachers teaching the French don't really know much French at all.

I would love them to be learning a language properly at this stage. I used to teach English as a foreign language to school children and I do mind my children not having access to this. I teach them a bit of French and Spanish, and have tried to get them a tutor, but haven't tried hard enough I suppose.

I think multilingualism makes it easier to think more abstractly and connect it to language, if that makes sense, rather than trying to get from one language to another.

If a round, red/green fruit is already called apple and pomme in your head it's not that much of a leap to add apfel to it whereas if you only conceive of the round, red/green fruit as apple it's a lot more difficult to think conceptually in another language.

Plus the facility for expression is increased the more languages you have available to you and you're less stuck on things being said or expressed one way so you pick up different grammatical structures or idioms more easily.

To add to that, bilinguals are typically used to pronouncing a greater variety of phonemes so find the actual physical act of speaking another language easier and hearing more tonal variations, which facilitates understanding.

Finally the more hooks you have to hang someonething on (or the more connections you have) the greater the likelihood that something will click because you have two points of reference.

Hm, most people tend to start off monolingual, then many become bilingual in school and then maybe some time in another country.

Learning any further languages will be easier, but I feel its always hardest to start with, because I have to create new hooks to hang things up on.

Actually, when you look at other countries, bilingualism is the norm, not the exception. I cannot remember the statistic, but it was over 70%, I believe.

There is a theory that a bilingual person has just one speech processing area in the brain, in comparison to a monolingual person having two linked areas. Subsequent languages are then "stored" in the same place, which may explain why bilinguals find it easier to learn a third or fourth language.

I think that once you start to learn another language you also get used to thinking more about grammar so it becomes easier. I know that when I learn something in French, I sometimes think, "Ah, it is the same sentence structure as in German".

My DC certainly picked up French faster than some of their friends here.

The 'one speech area for true bilinguals' makes complete sense to me! I'm a native English speaker, with fluent French and school German - when we went to Germany a while back I was constantly opening my mouth and finding that French came out. Yet English is never mixed.

It's as if English lives in one area, and all other languages live in the other area; when I want a foreign word I open the 'cupboard' and rummage around and sometimes the word comes out in wrong language.

Both my kids are fluent in French (we live in Switzerland), but DD being younger is much closer to bilingualism than my DS. He's finding German fairly easy at school, but more I think because it's close to English than because it's his 3rd language. It'll be very interesting to see how DD gets on with future languages.

Kokodan
I was on the phone to our dentist in Germany today and had to spell my name. I could not remember how to spell it in German, was doing the French spelling. And I am fluent in German, we lived there for 15 years.

Our DD has just started German in school too, she thinks it is really easy but that may change when they start to learn grammar. She reads well in French but is finding German and English trickier.

I know no one would conjugate verbs in primary. I'm not daft.

MmeLindt - yes, I have read that statistic, but that's the world over. Within Europe I think most people start off monolingual.

My DCs (2 and 5) are bilingual, we practice one parent one language and I stick to it, unless he has friends round and I adress several children. So far he always speaks English to DH and German to me, its just what we do and he has never questioned it or struggled.

He has just started to learn a little Spanish at school, in addition we have done a few songs etc at home. He loves it now but I feel he needed a bit of time to understand the concept of learning another language despite the fact that he already speaks two!?

wish ours learned something; we are in Scotland so a different curriculum but it so depends on the school and I would love them to learn some foregin language at an early stage

Kodokran, I had never thought about that, but it's true - I never mix English, but sometimes I want to say something in French, I open my mouth and Spanish or German come out. It's exactly like rumaging in a cupboard and not finding the wrong thing at the front.
However, my mother, who grew up German speaking and has lived 60 years in England does on occasion mix German with English - she will say something in English to me and in German to the postman.

Gabid
I remember my DD at about age 3 or 4 being very confused during a holiday in Holland as she could not understand what the locals were saying. For her, there was German and English and the thought of another language was baffling.

Yes, the stats in Europe are very different.

Pointylug
I did not mean to offend you. I meant that teaching practices have moved on considerably in the past 10 or 15 years.

There was an entitlement to learn a foreign language at ks2 but this was a woolly way to get out of making it statutory. The statutory aspect was supposed. To go through in the education bill before the election, but it never happened.
I have been our school's mfl coordinator for the last 6 years and now have all our class teachers teaching either German or Spanish. We have fantastic resources with native speakers on DVD so the children, and staff, are learning from them. This works for me as, I agree with my lea primary mfl advisor who thinks we should be 'lighting the fire rather than filling a jug'. My aim is to send them up to secondary with enthusiasm for languages and an interest in different cultures. They should also have some key language learning skills and strategies which are transferable, as anyone who has learnt more than one language on top of their 1st language will know. Because all our local secondary schools dropped German, and only teach French or Spanish, I felt very strongly that I wanted our children to experience some German, even if only for 2 years. (Guess which is my second language???)
Those of us in the business of primary mfl are now very worried about what will happen next, especially as LEAs are having to make some difficult budgetary decisions. Without the support of my advisor, I would never have got this far.

Teaching practices have moved on but, certainly in terms of secondary modern foreign languages, not for the better.

A friend of mine is a french and german teacher and she - and I- despair of some of the modern methods. No conjugations, rote learning expressly forbidden, teaching phrases with no understanding of the individual components.

I teach primary mfl and yes, the 'fun' way is appropriate to primary. But the teaching is too variable and always will be without proper planning and funding.

I also feel that the trend for teaching little bits of a variety of languages at primary is mainly due to the fact there is no proper planning or funding to co-ordinate primary and secondary teaching of mfls.

So far, I have heard of no compelling reason why this approach is better for children than focusing on one language at primary and branching out at secondary.