Why language learning is in freefall

No it's not. You have to have a thorough understanding of how things work and actually be able to apply that to a question. Sure at GCSE memorising worked but then GCSE papers don't have synoptic questions. Also, when you reach A2 you don't have your AS textbooks anymore, you are expected to remember what you covered at AS level. There is more competition for science degrees you're right, but this is mostly for medicine, natural sciences, forensics etc. Pure sciences are still fairly easy to get onto a course for at a good uni. Modern language degrees are too in great demand, and I think you've done well to choose to study languages. I'm by no means one of the people who thinks language are pointless, I just disagreed with your comments about science.
I wouldn't really know if the language department at my school was particularly bad in comparison to other departments to be honest. The school I attended when I chose my GCSE's was pretty much failing in all areas, having said that languages were taught pretty horrifically. So few people chose to study languages that most of the courses were dropped, this is probably expected in a special measures state school though.
Also, I don't know if this is relevant, but I can honestly say I've never met a language teacher who wasn't clearly insane.

I definitely think there needs to be changes. Teenagers aren't taught to have any passion for the languages, they're simply taught to pass an exam - and at the end of it, what do you have?! You can't even say a few sentences to a native speaker with any sort of confidence.

In my GCSE Spanish classes, we learn the same useless grammar again and again. We learn the words for 'health' and 'poverty' and whatnot, but we can't communicate or hold conversations.

We learn nothing about culture, and no passion is really ignited in students. People stop caring, because they see the lessons as irrelevant and tedious.

I wish that I was enjoying my Spanish lessons and becoming good at speaking and communicating, but in 4 years of having 3 hours per week, I know pretty much nothing. I'm going into Year 11, and dreading Spanish class.

No wonder people aren't taking languages to A-level - I'm certainly not going to.

Let's agree to disagree? Actually, my year 7 teacher literally had a mental issue (I'm not taking the mick of her for that), one is an ex punk who talks in a monotone, another married a slightly creepy Frenchman and another had a stalker in France during his uni year there.

Every year at this time the media and a few experts appear baffled and confused as to why every year less and less students are taking languages. They largely blame either arrogance on the part of British people (to assume everyone speaks English) or that it was making languages no longer compulsory back in 04. However it seems that none of these people are capable of waking up and smelling the coffee; learning a language in the UK is rubbish and the fact that numbers have free falled since it was no longer compusory says it all, teenager don't want to do it.


Now when I was in school a few years back I had to take a GCSE in a modern foreign language (in my case French which I got a B in) and at the end of it far from being able to speak French I felt like I had wasted 2 years and that I never wanted to learn french ever again. The course itself is an absolute stinker full of all sorts of fluff that if totally useless in a conversation and by the end all a student can do is parrot learned phrases. Now if you do take a GCSE then you would have been studying that language for 4-5 years and if you can't even hold a basic conversation after that amount of time that honestly what was the point in doing it at all?


The way we are taught is completely wrong, kids are taught too late (languages ideally need to start in primary school) and when they get to secondary school they are taught in a dull, boring way which just switches kids off. There's hardly anything interesting taught about the culture the language comes from and all the lessons can be boiled down into memory tests: this week remember colours, next remember animals etc. Sometimes the lessons are forced into 2 hour blocks due to timetabling which is absolutely hopeless and many kids (like myself) are/were just not interested enough to do anything outside of the classroom which is key to remembering and understanding.

Ultimately young people have no interest in taking languages and why would they? It's dull, difficult, unfufilling and not rewarding in the slightest.


Now admittedly if English is your first language it's a double edged sword, on the one hand it's great: you already speak a global language. On the other hand you are less likely to learn another. Why? because there is less impetus to, learning a second language is not a necessity the way it is in other countries but also we're not saturated in foreign language media the same way the rest of the world is exposed to hollywood films and english language music etc.


I've even spoken to a few people who when travelling abroad tried to shakily ask locals questions in their native tongue only to get replies back in near perfect english which is disheartening. One of the things people will find abroad is that people want to speak to you in english to help improve their own.
Finally people abroad in non english speaking countries are all learning one language and because of that there's always going to be people to practice inside and outside school be it friends or family. In the UK because we are learning many different ones because we have the choice it is much harder to find people who you can practice with especially as many adults are monolingual, there's no one to practice with at home.

With the system so broken it will take a long time to fix things and here a few things that I think need to change

--> Teach languages at an earlier age
--> Make language teaching more fun with greater focus on holding a conversation
--> Encourage adults to learn a second language so their children have someone to practice with at home
--> Offer a greater range of languages to study
--> Teach more about the culture that these languages come from


I'd really like to hear what everyone else thinks about on this topic!

Was it the one in the church hall on Stroget? I bought the Everyman edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall last year.

Two points though. Other nations seem to manage teaching kids a second language from an early age. I would agree with parents learning a second language, but I hate to come up with excuses, but it's a lot easier to learn languages younger. There minds are like sponges. That's why my Dutch friend uses his 6 year old daughter as a translator. She speaks fluent English, Dutch and Polish. Dutch because they live in Holland, Polishbecuse his mother is Polish and English because it's taught at school. She translates Polish for him so e can communicate with his in laws, and she translates English to the in laws whenever an English speaker comes to visit.


here's a skill learning languages, but that gap I think is smaller the younger the kids are.

I know that when I have kids they'll be learning a language from an early stage. I'll even try and learn it as well.

I think colours are useful in a real life situation and I suppose animals are taught because it's a bit more interesting than the contents of your pencil case etc.

I went to Russia recently and only met one person that spoke fluent English.

That's beside the point, because the contents of your pencil case are also mostly useless words.

Here's something you can do to figure out what I mean. Find your last 100 posts on TSR, and count how often you have used the words "green" or "mouse" or "biro" compared to the words "go" or "think" or "some" or "people". Conversely, for a foreigner reading your posts or talking to you in real life, knowledge of the latter four words will be much more important than knowledge of the first three.

You don't need to know the words "green", "blue" or "orange" in real life. You only need to be able to form sentences with relatively few but common words, like: "I like this dress. Do you think it looks good? I don't know if I should buy it. I really like it but I think it is too expensive." The ability to form simple sentences with commonly used words will get you a lot farther in a foreign country than a specialist vocabulary, which you can learn later, when you can already say "This looks great. What colour is it?". The most useful words have to come first.

On this page there is a link to a list of the most used English words, if you want to have a closer look. Similar lists exist for French, German and many other languages. We just ignore them and instead teach lists of colours and animals and indeed the contents of your pencil case and other specialist vocabulary.

We can still teach specialist vocabulary, AFTER all pupils have learned the 2000 most useful words and are able to use them without having to think too much. THEN by all means teach them about animals, or wind turbines or whatever interests them.

My experience of GCSE German-

Rote learning (Doesn't work for me, although it works for some)
Rote learning vocab lists
Obsession with the intricacies of grammar and sentence structure

All at the expense of-
Actually speaking the language and attempting to have conversation.

I think you're right. I definitely agree that teaching isn't up to scratch in languages and perhaps in a quite a lot of schools teaching colours is more than just a quick introduction to the language. A lot of the most commonly used words are connectives, prepositions etc. so they need some kind of theme in which to teach them, otherwise it's really boring rote learning.

Do you think that may be because we've moved away from teaching English Grammar in our own schools.? Peopl eare having difficulty understanding it.

Were you made to conjugate donner? Were you made to conjugate etre?

If someone dumped you in a monolingual French speaking community, how long would it be before the people you were staying with started doing that? You would be able to hold a conversation before anyone would start correcting your tenses and word order.

Part of the reason for the lack of motivation is because pupils have nothing they can do with what they have learnt. I suspect most GCSE students couldn't even follow an Asterix cartoon in French.

I actually think that not enough focus is spent on grammar at school and too much is spent on learning lists of vocab and random phrases. Really, what is the use of learning tonnes of words without being able to use them in a sentence? People are bound to feel confused and bored by language learning if they don't feel they could ever conduct a natural and free flowing conversation with it. People are embarrassed by the thought of speaking in a very basic and ungrammatical way, because we simply have far more awareness than a young child. We hate the thought of sounding stupid in a way that a toddler of course wouldn't. The trick is to give people the grammar skills to remove that fear of sounding silly, and give people the confidence to use the language in a natural way. When I did a language module at university, learning the grammar was the most important aspect of it. I found it really helpful for becoming confident in the language, as you could have a conversation without having to stick to particular phrases you'd had drilled into you. You could then begin to hold natural conversations with people about last weekend or what you're going to do next summer, without having to constantly grapple with how to say 'I did that' or 'i want to do this'. I think that once people feel confident in using the grammar of a language, it's much much easier to pick up the rest of it and in general, it becomes much less scary to use because you know you've got the basic building blocks there to be understood.


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