So, your children now have to learn a foreign language

In my experience, pretend to know. My daughter had to be very careful not to laugh.

and that German is somehow dying out because of 'ALL DEM NASTY immigrants' lol what.

Primary schools now have to teach foreign languages but there isn't an obvious choice of a foreign language for British children to learn. If schools had the freedom to teach any foreign language then:

1. What languages would you most like your children to learn?

2. Are there any languages that you would not like your children to learn?

3. If large numbers of children at the school already speak a particular language then would you like your children to learn that language?

4. If large numbers of children at the school are Muslim but very few speak Arabic then would you like your children to learn Arabic?

5. Should the choice of languages schools can teach be restricted only to those with the same alphabet as English?

This exactly! My mum is a primary school teacher. She has to teach French. She studied french for 3 years of high school back in the 70s. I'm sure she does her best, but as she says, it's not ideal. And pretty stupid in my opinion because the kids aren't going to learn well that way.

And my mum is actually in a good position of having actually learned French at some point in her life. One year they had a teacher teaching French who'd only ever studied German. She did a lesson on animals where she taught kids that "chat" is pronounced like the English chat. "Chien" is "chee - en" and "oiseau" is "oi - zow"

Primary schools now have to teach foreign languages but there isn't an obvious choice of a foreign language for British children to learn. If schools had the freedom to teach any foreign language then:

1. What languages would you most like your children to learn?

2. Are there any languages that you would not like your children to learn?

3. If large numbers of children at the school already speak a particular language then would you like your children to learn that language?

4. If large numbers of children at the school are Muslim but very few speak Arabic then would you like your children to learn Arabic?

5. Should the choice of languages schools can teach be restricted only to those with the same alphabet as English?

Youre making some very silly claims

'70% proficient'. You think that's low? Have you considered the demographic profile of those 'not proficient'? No thought not. They will be largely the over fifties (and people with learninng difficulties). Within thirty years almost all ethnic Germans will be bilingual.

And here comes the next weak leg of your argument, the straw man,laced with class hatred and making insinuations of racism. No sane person could have seriously read my comment that Germans are shrinking in numbers and that instead of having babies they are bringing in immigrants as equating to German is dying out "because of" immigrants! German is dying out because German speakers are dying out! (To clarify for the benefit of the dim witted)

German is a declining language

Germans have a very low birthrate and are replacing themselves with immigrants not babies

immigrants who would prefer to speak English than German

and who will happily watch the Anglicisation of Germany

Yet more ignorance! http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/world/18cnd-language.html "Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks." Languages such as Welsh , Irish, Yiddish, Romany, Walloon, Breton, Basque, and many many more less well known will no longer be truly living.

Many other languages such as Dutch, Danish, Swedish will likely be on life support.

Notes here on the diglossia of Danish (similar has happened to Welsh with English intrusion) and Welsh is already dying. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=965

The people who deny languages are dying also usually do not care.

All Germans learn English to a high standard

making it difficult for an English speaking beginner to get a chance for real life practice in Germany. It will get worse.

Writing in a piece for The Wall Street Journal, Dr John McWhorter said that in a century from now there will be ‘vastly fewer languages,’ which will be less complicated than they are today - especially in the way they are spoken. The American studies, philosophy and music expert at Columbia University, predicts that 90 per cent of languages will die out to leave around 600.


He said this will probably happen because of globalisation. As people migrate to new areas, cultures will become fragmented. Lesser known cultures and their unique languages will struggle to survive, leaving widely spoken languages such as English and Chinese to swallow them up and in turn wipe them out.

Totally agree with the 'pretend to know' from a previous post haha. If English is your native language and you have studied French for only three years in high school I can not imagine what the level must be . I have studied French for about five years and I only learned it properly when I actually lived there.

Getting native speakers to assist is a great way of getting them to hear the phonic differences, whilst they can still differentiate them.

If only we had someway of getting native speakers of other languages into the country. The EU has quite a few French, Spanish, German, etc native speakers ..

I have been informed that Mandarin could be overrated. Much international business in China is carried out in English and a high proportion of educated Chinese already know English or are learning it. Salaries in China are generally quite low for expats compared with other places.

From a money making perspective German and Arabic are better choices than Mandarin is for Engineers.

Arabic has some pluses to be sure but it is very challenging for English speakers and the scope for language visits is limited. It would also probably be seen as politically very controversial to make it compulsory.

Arabic is very different in terms of grammar from Germanic or Romance languages but it uses a completely phonetic alphabet unlike Mandarin.

I don't think it is sensible to make Arabic compulsory but it should definitely be an approved language to teach in primary schools and more readily available for GCSE. I'm of the opinion that a secondary school should not be allowed to claim that it specialises in languages unless it offers at least one non-European language.

I'm not confident that the scope and opportunity for language visits should have any bearing on the choice of language offered. Only a fraction of language students spend any appreciable time in a foreign country and day trips don't account to much in practice. There is a much wider range of video media available nowadays that can be used for foreign language teaching than in the past.

Nobody has yet answered my question in #52 as to what is the reason for the tradition, if not obsession, of teaching French in British schools?

Several years ago a member of UKIP told me that he thinks that there is an excessive and potentially unhealthy bias towards teaching French in British secondary schools. He would like to see a wider variety of non-European languages available to study. Later he mentioned about the increasing number of children who speak another language and how schools see it as a problem rather than a potential asset, then he stated how the (then Labour) government utterly fails to take these children into account when devising policies to teach foreign languages in schools.

Yes I know, but an extremly challenging alphabet for all that and read right to left!

I think secondary school is fine. There would only be low demand at primary level so it would not be cost effective.

I also feel very strongly that the diversity of foreign languages at primary school should end, and we should focus on one alone, as European primary schools focus on English and achieve beneficial results. A piecemeal approach does not work.

Again I disagree, looking at the long term impact on pupils Most are never going to learn the language up to a high level of fluency, for the majority, the goal has to be a basic 'holiday' proficiency, thus a language which people will find a benefit on future holidays has an advantage over say Mandarin which most will never use again. These are the historic reasons for choosing French German Spanish and sometimes Italian. They still apply.

We have to think about not only motivating the high flyers who may use a language ina work context or to migrate, but those whose only use is holidays.

I never had any problems with the Arabic alphabet but Japanese was a very different game.

I think that there would be demand for Arabic in primary schools with a large proportion of Muslim children. There is demand for Arabic amongst Muslim families regardless of country of origin or language that the parents speak.

Evidence exists from independent Islamic schools that children, and their parents, not of Pakistani origin have resented having to learn Urdu. I suspect the same would happen with Muslims of Pakistani origin who had to learn Bengali or Uzbek at school.

That's because English is an obvious language from economic and access to published material perspectives. As I have previously stated, there is no obvious choice of a foreign language for British children to learn. Therefore standardising on one foreign language will become more of an academic exercise rather than for the utility of the knowledge of the language as the case would be for children in foreign countries learning English.

It all depends on where children will go on holiday in the future. German won't be much use if they want to visit Thailand or India...

There are large numbers of teenagers and young adults that show little interest in visiting European countries for holidays because they have their origins outside of Europe and instead prefer to visit their country of origin.

There are also large numbers of teenagers and young adults who only want to visit parts of Europe where English is commonly used - like clubbing in Ibiza and other popular package holiday destinations.

The way I see the situation is that the government decided to leap before they looked. Teaching foreign languages was foisted upon primary schools at short notice before an infrastructure was put in place to teach them. Unlike computer science with its standard curriculum, schools have the freedom (within limits) to choose which language to teach according to the knowledge and desires of its teachers.

In the years when I was at primary school, being able to play the piano and use computers for office tasks was valued highly at job interviews for teachers but foreign languages didn't matter. More value would have been placed on a language that families of children at the school use - like Urdu or Gujarati - to communicate to the children with rather than a European language.

It might have been a better idea to allow local authorities to decide whether schools should teach languages or not and also allow schools to teach a wider range of languages.

I definitely think schools should take advantage of the existing language skills of their students - I understand it might not be feasible for the schools to offer tuition or classes if numbers are small, but I do think they should encourage multilingual kids to develop their non-English language and to take exams in it to prove their abilities to employers. And if they have a high number of students with a common non-English language, then I do think tuition should be provided.

Putting the choice of which language to teach under the control of the local authorities, like RE, would be much better in my opinion. Especially for when children go to secondary school, which otherwise would have a mix of children who know the basics of the taught language and those who don't know a single word. However, most existing MFL specialist teachers, at secondary, tend to teach French, German or Spanish rather than Urdu or Gujarati so it would probably be cut to those initial three. Having said that, the children with EAL, that I have worked with, have not had French, German or Spanish as their first language so I do see the interest in other languages.