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?

Pointy
Even when I was in school there was too little attention paid to teaching the children the basics of the language. When I started learning German, at the age of 19, I had to buy an English grammar book as I was unsure of the difference between an adjective and an adverb. Even now I am not clear on the various tenses. Which is causing me problems when DD has homework to do.

What age group do you teach? Do children learn to conjugate verbs in English? I have been wondering this, as DD has lists of French verbs to learn at school (she is in local Swiss school)

Absolutely agree with you there. Stupid to teach two years of one language then go onto a different one. It should be set in the curriculum.

When I was at school, I learned nearly all my grammar via my french and german classes because it was during the phase of 'grammar is not important'.

Children do not learn to conjugate verbs in English, although there has to be reinforcement of some of the irregular verbs.

Do you think that means conjugating verbs in a foreign language is not necessary?

No, think it is necessary. Just wondered if it was taught as such in school. Could not remember being taught basic English grammar.

It was one of the challenging thing about tutoring German kids. Trying to get into the mindset of the foreign language student. Grammar is just there for me, I don't think about whether I write "we were" or "we was".

We teach grammar now. Not conjugation though.

pointy lug, I think the problem is that we come at this from 2 very different but perfectly valid educational positions. I am trained as a primary school class teacher, which means I am trained to teach a bit of about 10 different subjects! I see my role in all these subjects ( whether I like them or not) to teach the children the basic skills, which they can then build on in secondary school with specialist teachers, and can develop those areas further in which they show particular talent or enthusiasm. In the core subjects, obviously, that is reading, writing, calculating etc, but there is huge debate about the others. A music specialist might be cross if I were teaching music and couldn't play an instrument, a pe teacher might wonder how I can teach netball skills when I hated netball at school myself! But really, we are teaching VERY basic skills- how to use rhythm and to enjoy different types of music, how to throw and catch a ball in different ways etc. I see MFL in primary school as just another subject like that- how do we look for clues to work out what something might mean? How do different people greet each other? If we employ specialists to teach in primary school for MFL, where does that leave all the other subjects?
BTW we do conjugate verbs sometimes but as we don't do this in English, some of the teachers really don't know what I mean by conjugate!!

Boatto
Interesting. And it illustrates the problem with MFL teaching in UK.

If MFL teaching is not given the same status (obviously with less hours) as English, Maths etc, then it will only ever be a bit of light entertainment. Instead of actually teaching with a goal in mind - say having basic French skills before the child moves to Secondary school.

The same is true in Germany, btw. There was a big push to get English into Primary schools, only they did not have enough teachers. Teachers who could speak only VERY basic English were sent on a short course. The standard is often very bad.

Mms Lindt
Thank you for you considered opinion on my teaching methods. I would prefer to teach 4 years of German but have no one except myself who could teach the last 2 years really and I don't want to be that kind of specialist teacher. We have had no support from our local secondaries (I know it is very different in other areas) and really didn't like the idea of our children doing 4 years of French with us and then going up and doing another lot, starting all over again, as the secondaries weren't interested in liaising with us at the time.
In fact I think we do a really good job showing our children a wider world, particularly as most of our catchment do not travel abroad much and have very little contact with other cultures.

Sorry Mme Lindt x post and up far too late!!

No problem. It has been interesting to see how the language is taught.

I do understand where you are coming from, I spent some of my childhood living in Germany in the 80s and have a Modern Languages degree so am fairly well versed in how to learn a language, but I think the problem we have is the objective. Music, PE, Art, History,Geography, DT could all demand to be taken more seriously in the primary school, but that is not what we are about. We need to teach the children how to read and write, calculate, reason, discuss, investigate, explore, research, cooperate, listen and enjoy moving. The detail is what secondary education and their specialist teachers is for.

I agree with that, but don't see why there could not be some kind of a basic structure to language learning in Primary.

I taught English to children in Germany, and by the time they were 7 or 8 yo these kids would be able to introduce themselves, they would know colours, feelings, vocabulary of the house, body ...

That can still be done in a fun way, without pressure on the children.

Then if every Primary school taught to the same curriculum then Secondary schools could stock up on that knowledge, and add the details of grammar, past and future tenses etc.

I know that this is Utopian, as the funding is not there.

There is a basic structure, it's called The primary languages framework and it's a really good document.
nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/85274
Actually, our kids can do a lot of that after 2 years.

Most schools don't have a native French/Spanish speaker on the staff, so I think schools should fund peripatetic native speakers. They can be great value for money.

Also, Running Snake (great name, where is it from?) summed up the objectives of MFL teaching as: 'to promote a positive attitude to learning languages, to teach some of the skills necessary for learning languages and to promote intercultural understanding, which is obviously a vital asset in an increasingly global economy/society'. So why not use the languages already in the classroom, ie the ones spoken by the kids at home? Get Faisal to teach his pals a bit of Arabic, Navid can be in charge of the Persian department, Cristian can coach the kids in Romanian, etc. And see if the parents would mind doing a 6-week stint of half-hour slots in their language. They were doing that sort of thing in my kids' school in the 1980s. My son has always really admired friends who can speak another language at home.

I agree that (Serpent again)'It is therefore not really important which language is taught, although it is recommended that it is a coherent program of one/two languages, not little bits and pieces'. It should be possible to put forward a basic programme that could be used for two or three languages, so you can greet (week 1) talk about food (week 2) etc in several languages.

Singing
We do some of that as well. We try and encourage the teachers to use the skills of the multilingual children we occasionally have in the classroom to widen the children's knowledge of the world, but usuingthat model as your main mfl teaching is not sustainable. Some children don't want to be teachers or don't like being seen as different. What about supporting resources? Could get expensive if the taught language keeps changing!
Mme Lindt
The other important issues that making language teaching different in th Uk:

1. we are battling a very widely felt view that mfl is not really important as everyone else speaks English anyway. 'shouldn't our kids be able to speak English properly first'is not an uncommon remark!
2. Which language should we teach? Elsewhere in the world the decision is usually straightforward and usually (although not always) English. I really want the children to have experienced at least one Germanic and one Romance language, ad they are the basis for so many European languages.

Thanks for the link to the curriculum. Does every school have to follow that? There seems to be very differing experiences on this thread.

Yes, choosing which language to concentrate on is not easy. I think that many go for French or German as they were always seen as the "business languages", deemed to be worthwhile as they would help further the child's career.

Unfortunately, as the entitlement to a foreign language at ks2 was never actually made statutory, the framework itself is not statutory, just guidance.
I know there is a huge difference across the country, mainly because not every primary school has a nutter like me who is prepared to cajole, persuade and bully enthuse the staff until they teach the language. Our LEA has also passed a lot of money down to the schools, which my management team have actually let me spend on mfl, whereas I know in other schools it has gone elsewhere in the curriculum. As the money was not 'ring fenced' they can do that.
The language choice is a really contentious issue- I have fight hard for German.

had to fight hard!

The over-riding consideration for language choice should be someone who can teach it.

In the absence of a specialist LEAs should decide what it is for each area, based on the available resources.

I see the logic both in embedding a set of goals in primary language learning to achieve a minumum standard but also in tasting lots of different languages. It depends what your desired result is. Learning bits of different languages, if you learn the same 6 or so basic topics or interactions, helps children compare languages and raises awareness of different languages and the cultures. A sustained focus on one language will encourage proficiency but that needs to be backed up and continued at secondary level.

I used to teach secondary German and Spanish and when they started introducing MFL in primary I was expecting great things, e.g. Y7 children who have some basic knowledge in a foreign language, being able to move them forward quickly and do exciting thing with them, A-level standard by Y11. I was sadly disappointed and to this day secondary teachers start from the beginning in Y7, although some children seem to already know a lot (mostly in French) and do well.

Not sure about GCSE uptake these days but I don't get the impression its very high.

I'm v.interested in language learning. My dcs speak 3 languages and go to a bilingual school (French/English, 2 1/2 days per week of each). When we arrived here, DS3 couldn't speak the community language - French - at all really. It took him 2 weeks of school to be conversant (he was 3yo). Most of the children are francophone, and the playground and administrative language is French.

Anyway, most of the children in my ds1's bilingual class have now been doing 50% of all their lessons in English for the last 5 1/2 years. None of the francophone children speak English like native speakers, except those who've recently joined the class from periods spent living in the US/UK/Oz. Some speak well but heavily accented, some speak quite badly. Those in ds2's class, after 3 1/2 years bilingual schooling often don't understand what I say very well, and won't reply to me in English. On the other hand the children who don't have French at home all speak it fluently - there's true immersion in French.

So my point really is that I wonder how much you can hope to achieve through a few lessons a week?

Lots of interesting points here.

Singing, I would love to use the language skills in my school, but we are in a very rural area where my European heritage is the most exotic thing around! I am half German and married to a Frenchman. I do bring in any passing foreigner I meet; exchange students, au pairs, friends of friends etc.

The choice of language is often contentious, but in my LEA nearly all the schools chose French because the majority of teachers had learnt a little French when they were at school. There is also the problem of what happens at transition to secondary school; if half the children have reached Level 4 in French, does the secondary start them again at the beginning because the other half of the intake didn't do it at their primaries? (Sadly, in my experience, yes, leading to demotivation among some of my best students.) This could be a very good argument for a language not taught at the local secondary. The skills are the same.

It is also not the job of the primaries to teach the first bit of the KS3 curriculum. I would also be wary of teaching 'colours, numbers, greetings, common foods': that could so easily turn into an exercise in memorising lists. We teach songs, rhymes and games, reading story books, watch video clips and generally try to help the children answer the question "What would it be like to be a child in France/Germany/Spain?"

RomanHoliday, I quite agree that you can't teach a language in an hour a week. You can introduce an awareness of language and ideally a love of language, as well as teaching language-learning strategies which will be useful for the rest of their lives.

boatto, I am a primary teacher

Sorry pointy, have just reread everything and I can't think why I thought you were secondary !

My kids did limited amounts of spanish from reception, they love it!!