Abolish primary language lessons?

A surprise survey by the Catholic University of Eichstaett has thrown the educational authorities into confusion. An unpublished study of school teachers shows that 95 per cent of sixth formers who had primary school English lessons were no better at the language than children who did not. Two thirds of the teachers consider English instruction before the age of 11 'completely redundant'.

(The Swedes maybe have the advantage of extensive broadcasting of English language TV, this may be a significant influence)

I know you all love languages-into-primary-schools, and so do I when they are well taught, but actually it seems to be a waste of time. At least in Germany, there is some evidence that they are pretty useless:


link

I've suspected this before, though I think it is down to lack of timetabling and language teachers who can barely speak the language themselves. Regardless, these limitations are real, and I don't think they can realistically be overcome, so I think there is a real case to be made against wasting money and resources on badly taught and inefficient language lessons in primary schools.

I think this would be very significant. This basically doesn't exist in Germany (everything is dubbed on German TV), so German primary children typically hear the language for 1 or 2 lessons a week in a classroom (of 30 children = basically negligible speaking time per child) and that's it. The teaching is hit and miss (no specialist language teachers), the children have nothing to use the language for and no-one to practise it with. If there was some element of immersion (even just native speakers as teachers would be a huge plus), then I think primary languages could be huge, but unfortunately I don't think this is realistic for mainstream schools.

Don't Sweden dub children's TV though? Or do they use only subtitles?

"A surprise survey by the Catholic University of Eichstaett has thrown the educational authorities into confusion. An unpublished study of school teachers shows that 95 per cent of sixth formers who had primary school English lessons were no better at the language than children who did not. Two thirds of the teachers consider English instruction before the age of 11 'completely redundant'."

This is quite contrary to the research of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker though, who have done many years of research and determined the exact opposite. They show that it is much harder to learn a language after 11. Perhaps they have drawn the wrong conclusion and it is the education system that is to be blamed.

They don't say that children cannot learn the language - they do say the teaching in primary schools is bad (in the article) - so bad that it is essentially redundant and has no longterm effects. Specialist language teachers at secondary school usually have to start from scratch because of this, and by the end of the first year at secondary school, all the children are on the same level anyway.

That implies it could be fixed. However, in practice it is very difficult to fix, because there just are not enough language specialist teachers for all primary schools, and not enough hours in the primary school timetable. So the point is, if you cannot realistically fix it, perhaps it is better not to spend any more money on it.

I think that the UK, which only introduced primary languages very recently, will have very similar problems. There is an extreme shortage of language specialists in the UK - so the vast majority of pupils will be taught by teachers who only just scraped a GCSE in French, or less in some cases - and there is very little space in the timetable - I think 1 hour per week is allocated to languages now? That is useless. Only primary schools who go above and beyond that (say teacher-trained native or at least fluent speakers, at least 3 hours a week) will see long-term effects. The idea is sound, but it is not practicable.

One idea for the UK is to teach a community language - Hindi, Polish or Arabic, for example. That would have the advantage that there are tons of native speakers who could teach it, and (most crucially) children would have friends to practise with every day. That is probably the closest to immersion you can get in a mainstream primary school. But the government doesn't seem keen on community languages, so I doubt that would be funded...