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Language lessons 'should aim for more than phrasebook competence'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30053548

Language teachers should aim beyond "functional phrasebook competence" and encourage self-expression in pupils, a leading headmistress is to say.

Bernice McCabe, headmistress of North London Collegiate School, will say teachers should be "a thorn in the side of British insularity and reticence".

Her comments will be made at the start of a course for language teachers run by the Princes Teaching Institute.

The aim is to bring "new life" into language lessons, Mrs McCabe says.

In her remarks to be made on Saturday, Mrs McCabe, who is also co-director of the Princes Teaching Institute, acknowledges that the obstacles "are many".

She says a lot of schools are put off from offering language qualifications by "the perception that top grades in languages are harder to obtain than in many other subjects".


This lady has the right of it. It's annoying how rigid my GCSE German classes were and how little scope they incorporated, despite my enthusiastic teacher. We need to teach languages as gateways into other cultures, as tools, not as just another subject.
So very true. By the way, my friend spoke rather good French but she got laughed at for being too formal, her friends told her how normal people speak and she got in trouble for it at school.
You can't expect to aim for anything more than phrasebook competence with low amount of lessons per week. In case, it was not obvious, languages needs small doses at frequent intervals. You can't remove someone's thirst with just two drops of water.
The problem with languages is that they're an absolute nightmare to learn unless you're actually passionate about them. I had absolutely zero interest in learning French because I was never planning to use French in my life (and it didn't help that my teacher was horrible) so French for me was torture. If I had been learning a language I actually wanted to learn, like Swedish, I think I'd have been a lot happier and I'd have actually had an incentive to try and go beyond getting marks in exams.

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