What do you think about primary languages?

[Hoxmama]

Now that all schools have to teach a modern language at KS2, something has had to give way in the curriculum to make time for it.

In dd's school, the required hour's been taken half from literacy and half from numeracy.

Any thoughts?

Our independent primary school taught a different MFL every year from year 3 to year 6 for a couple of lessons a week which included 'language awareness' as well as the language being studied. 'Language Awareness' was supposed to be about how languages worked and how they were structured etc but also covered stuff about non-verbal communication & was imo rather interesting. The theory behind this was to give a taster of the languages and a solid basis to build on future language learning without going to such depth that a child would get bored & put off. Seemed to work for my dc too.

I admit to wishing they'd stuck with a single language and gone further with it, but both the two children I know who learned French from nursery in one case & infants in the other right through to year 9, both got bored & gave it up before doing GCSE. The trouble is that in the early years you end up going over the same stuff again & again as new people join etc. Then at secondary they assume no knowledge & you begin over (yet) again.

So, while I definitely think languages should be taught at primary age (& it enriches the curriculum really - they spend ages & ages doing maths & English & I'm sure benefit from a break from those subjects), I'm not altogether sure what the best way of doing it is.

I believe that language learning in primary school has to be part of a structured programme that continues right through education if it is to be worth the investment by both the educator and the pupil (and probably also the parents). It's no good having patchy provision that means that children are made to start beginner classes from scratch regularly or taster courses; children need to make regular progress that they can self-monitor in order to feel motivated and to build self-confidence.

In my DD's (French-English) pre- and primary school, 100% of children do both French and English and 60% of the year group add Spanish (four x 45 minutes per week) from year 5 equivalent. The school has a lot of success with Spanish.

So...answering the register in a language... that seems to be an overriding theme - right....

Look, don't get me wrong - I love languages. I taught German at KS3 for two years and i came into teaching thinking that all children should learn from an early age etc etc...its just the practical implications that i have grave concerns about.

Spanish is easier than French at GCSE level imo and that is prob the main reason why it is so popular at the majority of schools today. That wasn't the practice 20 years ago so that is prob why more French teaching available at primary level i would guess.

My experience is a bit like scummy's - DD learnt French from Reception to Y5 and it was a complete waste of time. She learnt a few songs, body parts and rooms of a house. French homework was colouring-in FFS.

In Y6 the school taught German instead.

Now she's Y7 and doing Spanish and Latin. Next year she'll be adding German to that.

She's very aware of different languages, but that comes as much from our experience of travel and DH working round most of Europe. And actually she's a bit fed up of them at school.

I think it will be tokenistic- there is not the time to dedicate to it in the currriculum, and aas Anna points out- you do need native speakers.

I have a friend who is a primary teacher whose subject is French- great for those in her school... except her school want her to teach mandarin She is unhappy about this as the pronunciation is so difficult, and she has to spend a long time preparing, trying to perfect it- she does not feel confident of her ability to teach the whole of the junior school the language- imagine 360 children all mispronouncing 'please' incorrectly etc.

It is short-sighted- especially as her actual first language is dutch!

The school where I was a governor has fewer than 200 children, yet they come from over 40 countries, speaking over 30 languages. There they are intending to do language tasters, using parents' skills... not sure that is ideal either, but smaller schools have even less budget to play with.

I think everyone agrees that learning new languages is easier/best done at an early age but as seeker says we already have an over crowded primary curriculum so something has to give. Not so long ago there was a huge outcry because British children were leaving school with low levels of literacy and numeracy. I;m not sure how taking time away from these subjects to teach MFL is going to improve the situation

My DCs are both taught french at (primary) school. I do agree that in order to learn a language properly you would need to learn it at primary age. Unfortunately though, the attempt is tokenistic as their french is truly appalling after years of it ...

One lesson a week is NOT going to teach primary school children any new language, especially if taught by a non-native speaker.

In my experience of raising bilingual children myself (English/German), you need LOTS of exposure and opportunities to speak a language that you're learning. Even worse, when taught by a non-native teacher, the pronounciations can be pretty bad (am just thinking how my dd pronounces petit-dejeuner in French... shudder).

I also think it's a shame that there are not more qualified Spanish, Mandarin, German or Italian language teachers around - we should be offering our children more languages than only French (as much as I love the language and the country ) considering their future usefulness (again, in my own experience of working in the finance industry across Europe).

I think it is a good idea but it needs to be a longer term goal. IMO the thing to aim for is Canadian style immersion in primary from the word go (but I really hope it won't be French, nothing against the people or their language but feel really annoyed dd will have to learn French and not Italian which she absolutely loves). So we are having to do Italian outside school... mutter and moan.

Anyway,

I think you need to train up very throughly and send overseas (accent, fluency etc) the teachers who are to do this immersion thing. I think it has to be a well-funded programme and well paid job to get the right people. They need to go and view programmes of this type overseas and produce good quality material. Then you implement it and the first generation comes out of school having been through that programme, from those dc the newly trained teachers will be even better able to implement the primary immersion language programme and so on and so on, improving with each generation.

I think honestly 1 or 2 hours a week at school in primary is pretty much a waste of time. It's not nearly enough to be effective.

It will cost a bomb to get set up but either you do it properly or don't bother with it IMO

The truth is that languages in primary are not really seen as a big priority, if they were, the money would be found. It's all a bit lipservice IMO

A friend of mine trained as a primary school teacher in East Germany and after the wall came down and the system changed, he was obliged to do a year of courses at university alongside work to bring his qualifications in line with the West German curriculum. (Dunno what exactly this entailed) but one thing was that he had to learn to teach Engish. Of course he'd had Russian at school himself and spoke no English. I don't know how many credits he did before he was expected to go off and teach English to his class, can't have been more than a couple of months all in all though.

I am really keen on my children learning a MfL and have sent them to a Le Jolie Ronde after school club for French. They absolutely love it. They do not do much writing, the course is mainly about learning to speak the language. I am hoping that this exposure to the language at a young age will help them when they eventually study French at secondary school.
I agree that it is important that the language is taught by a native speaker. My dd's pronunciation is fantastic.

What I could see working at my children's primary school is one day a week having a lunchtime totally devoted to Spanish. They have a teacher who is half Spanish and when she is on lunch duty she could talk to the children, discipline, praise etc in Spanish. The menu could be in Spanish and the children could ask for their meal in Spanish. I think it would be fun and permeate in a way that a formal hour a week wouldn't. Would this work do you think?

totally agree with Eachpeach,Quattro,Annasmami and Zzen

Well- forget mfl... when are we going to teach all primary children latin? Many of the mfl they do in secondary school would be greatly helped by having grounding in latin first.

My DD has done half hour of French a week since Year 1. They follow the Jolie Ronde (sp?) from what I can gather and their teacher is French. It seems to be lots of songs and acions, adnd role play. DD enjoys it and seems to have picked up quite a bit of vocab in the past two years.

It is only half an hour a week at present and doesn't impact on the rest of the curriculm, which is already very varied anyway.

latin would be good - i loved latin

...and at primary level i presume they wouldn't drone on about 'God its a blooming dead language' as i have heard from pupils.

I don't really think that people should worry about 1/2hour being taken from literacy as the children will be developing skills that are part of the literacy curriculum, for instance, speaking and listening skills, whilst, usually, having fun and doing something a bit different. Primary Languages isn't really so much about teaching them to speak another language as it is about giving them a flavour of formal language learning, attuning their ear to the sounds of a new langage and teaching them a little about another culture. Many children (around 44% in one local school) in school will be bilingual now anyway so thier language learning skills will already have been tuned up learning English!

dd learns Italian for half an hour a week, in Reception. She enjoys it, but tells me she 'can speak Spanish' and can't do much more, after nearly a year, than count to ten.

And she's fully (Eng/French) bilingual! No harm done, but not much else either really.

OTOH, a friend of hers does French club after school once a week, and is learning loads of vocab and loving it. So maybe it depends on the child.

my own experiences no doubt shape my attitude

I grew up in Sweden where virtually everybody is supposed to speak one foreign language (English) and educated people are expected to be able to cope with 3 or 4 (2 foreign languages were the minimum requirement for university when I applied)

however, they don't actually start English until they are 10, and the second foreign language at the start of secondary school

otoh my gifted dd started French in Yr 5 and seemed to learn virtually nothing until she reached secondary school

I also teach at a Modern Languages Department and what I hear around me about students' knowledge of French when they arrive here is not terribly reassuring

to me, understanding the language well enough to speak it and read a newspaper by the time you're 16 would be preferable to being able to count to 10 and sing a nursery rhyme with a perfect accent at age 5.

it is not true that the ability to learn languages switches off at a certain age; the ability to recreate accents perfectly deteriorates for most people past age 10 or so, but with adolescences comes a greater ability to process grammar effectively

otherwise university teaching of foreign languages simply wouldn't work: yet we have plenty of professors who are reassuringly fluent in several languages

my mother learnt Old Church Slavonic at the age of 67. So much for the language-learning ability switching off. And we have plenty of mature students at uni.

Complete and utter waste of time.

I happened to be helping to take someone around my dcs' primary school a few weeks ago and walked into a year 2 class where the teacher was teaching them Spanish.

I did an 0'level in Spanish 20 years ago. The teacher said "Hola" to me, and I replied as per my O'level "hello, how are you?". He looked blankly at me and said - gosh, your Spanish is good, are you fluent?

What is the point in him teaching my dcs the 30 or so random words he has written down? This will not give them a grasp of the language. It is a waste of curriculum time which would be better spent improving on the basics.

"to me, understanding the language well enough to speak it and read a newspaper by the time you're 16 would be preferable to being able to count to 10 and sing a nursery rhyme with a perfect accent at age 5."

Totally agree Cory

Agree with GooseyLoosey too