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    #26
    Except for the football

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      #27
      Originally posted by imp View Post
      I don't get what Brits and Americans (or their education systems) have in general against learning foreign languages. Is it down to the way they are taught at school?
      At the most basic level, I think so. I assume current UK schoolkids' experiences will be broadly the same as mine were: I was in school during the 1990s (I turned 6 in 1990 and 16 in 2000, so basically that decade is my pre-sixth-form school experience). I learnt no foreign languages in infants or junior schools (some of you will know these as a combined primary school; in my village it was two adjacent but different schools), and no English grammar beyond what verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives were. I already knew the no foreign-languages thing was a bit daft because two of my cousins (one two years older than me, one six months younger) were born and brought up in Barcelona and had started English classes pretty much when they started school (I mean obviously they didn't really need them given their mum was English, but I knew that schools in other countries did this a lot sooner than I was experiencing, is my point). I (and I probably wasn't alone) quickly realised there was a bit of stuff we'd not been told about grammar when, on my second day in Big School at the age of 12, I had my first French class and the teacher started throwing around technical grammatical terms as if we all obviously knew what they meant. Fuck knows why, she wasn't that old, she must have known we hadn't been taught that stuff – but her teaching of French was based on us knowing the names for the different tenses, and what the word 'conjugate' meant, and other stuff, and we didn't even have that to work with. And then a year later, still not actually having been taught any of that stuff, we started German, and bloody hell.

      Obviously these days I'm much more comfortable with grammar in English, and with the idea of living and communicating in a foreign language (possibly not coincidentally: I've never had a Spanish class, it was all picked up from reading, listening and conversing). I'd even quite like to start teaching myself some Catalan and dip back into German at some point. But if my experience was typical of schoolkids in the 90s, then it would certainly explain why on trips back to the UK so many people my own age look at me wide-eyed when they realise I can speak Foreign.

      Comment


        #28
        I don't think it's the teaching exactly. Language teachers are well trained and well qualified and up to date with second language acquisition theory, and all of that. There are "good" and "bad" teachers just like in any subject, but the vast majority are very good at what they do.

        I think it's the value that society puts on language learning. We simply don't value it. It's increasingly an optional subject, and the message kids get is that that's it's not at the same level as STEM subjects or English language and literature or humanities or whatever. It's below even PE to be honest (at least PE is compulsory).

        Comment


          #29
          Part of this of course is that English as a foreign language is clearly and obviously necessary (and not only do parents know this but kids too as they go online and join communities unconstrained by national borders). English is increasingly seen as a life skill with as much importance as, say, maths. This is not obviously the same for languages other than English (though it could be seen as such if there was some political will).

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            #30
            Originally posted by Sam View Post
            I had my first French class and the teacher started throwing around technical grammatical terms as if we all obviously knew what they meant. Fuck knows why, she wasn't that old, she must have known we hadn't been taught that stuff – but her teaching of French was based on us knowing the names for the different tenses, and what the word 'conjugate' meant, and other stuff, and we didn't even have that to work with.
            Exactly my experience.

            Comment


              #31
              Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
              I don't think it's the teaching exactly. Language teachers are well trained and well qualified and up to date with second language acquisition theory, and all of that. There are "good" and "bad" teachers just like in any subject, but the vast majority are very good at what they do.

              I think it's the value that society puts on language learning. We simply don't value it. It's increasingly an optional subject, and the message kids get is that that's it's not at the same level as STEM subjects or English language and literature or humanities or whatever. It's below even PE to be honest (at least PE is compulsory).
              (In case the above was meant as a reply to my post, which was directly above it) I wasn't criticising the language teaching I received at secondary school – I was criticising the complete lack of basic grammar teaching I (and everyone else in my secondary school, most of whom went to different junior/primary schools, and Sporting) had had at infants and junior school, which meant that the second we were met with all these terms and the assumption that we'd know what they meant in our first French class, we already felt way out of our depth. When I look back on it now, I was far more nonplussed at that than I was at the teacher talking to us in nothing but French for the first five minutes of the class (which I wasn't expecting at the time, obviously, though I know now it's good practice).

              Comment


                #32
                Part of the ‘value’ of languages that ad hoc talked about is the way schools and parents have been encouraged to think they are ‘hard’ GCSE or A levels so most kids should steer well clear.

                I’m a childless person but from my wee brother (late accident so 13 years younger) to mine and Ms F’s nephews and nieces we’ve had a string of disappointments trying to encourage them to stick with languages: ‘I’m rubbish at it’ ‘my form tutor says pick something I can get an A at’

                despite having made a career out of it, I only got Bs and I was living in German in my teens.

                postscript is my wee brother now texts me in Spanish and is enthusiastically learning in his 40s...after getting to study it in prison...

                Comment


                  #33
                  Originally posted by Sam View Post
                  When I look back on it now, I was far more nonplussed at that than I was at the teacher talking to us in nothing but French for the first five minutes of the class (which I wasn't expecting at the time, obviously, though I know now it's good practice).
                  The direct method. I know it has many advantages but I hate it as a sometime language learner myself. I remember having ten minute classes in something like Turkish during TEFL courses to show us the technique, seeing other students understanding what was being taught, getting the structures worked out; whereas I would be feeling totally lost and hoping to god that the teacher didn't pick on me to give a response.

                  Originally posted by Sam View Post
                  I was criticising the complete lack of basic grammar teaching I (and everyone else in my secondary school, most of whom went to different junior/primary schools, and Sporting) had had at infants and junior school, which meant that the second we were met with all these terms and the assumption that we'd know what they meant in our first French class, we already felt way out of our depth
                  I only found out what was meant by active and passive voice in my first year studying English at university.

                  Comment


                    #34
                    It wasn't directed at you Sam, more trying to tease apart this idea of "teaching". The method that I (and many of the people on this board I assume) learned French at school with is called the "Audio-Lingual Method", which was in vogue at the time. These days it's largely out of favour, although to be honest, though I haven;t had cause to speak French for over 30 years really, I can still dredge it up and I reckon given a couple of weeks in a Francophone country it would largely come back to me. So, it was a method that basically worked for me as a learner.

                    I do agree too, that for most of us the metalanguage of grammar is something we first learned in French (or other foreign language), because we never really looked at it in English. I think we knew what nouns and verbs were, but pluperfect tenses and conjugation was in itself a foreign language.

                    Comment


                      #35
                      As far as the US is concerned, one has to take into account the combination of xenophobia and local control of curricula, which leads to some secondary schools not offering foreign languages at all and many more having a very limited offering. Language classes and teachers are always in the line of fire when budgets need to be cut.

                      Comment


                        #36
                        Originally posted by imp View Post
                        Why is learning a language always perceived as a chore rather than a joy?
                        i think the simple answer is that learning a language is a chore, or at least much of it is. There's a lot of unavoidable rote learning of vocabulary, word endings, tenses and so on, and however creative your teacher is, at some point you just have to memorise chunks of language and repeat set formulations over and over if you want to progress. In previous eras, kids were more accustomed to having to commit wodges of stuff to memory, because that's what schooling was about. It didn't necessarily make them better at speaking or understanding a language, because those require extra skills. But it did mean that MFL stood out a bit less as a difficult, dry subject.

                        In English schools a large obstacle is the national curriculum, which i think is based on the common European framework, and is simply too full of stuff which there isn't time to get through with any thoroughness. And huge class sizes in Y7-Y9 don't help, although it's no better in France: in our teacher training we were told that the average student should speak the target language for about five minutes a lesson, of which less than one minute will be in earshot of the teacher, so that if everything has gone to plan, they'll speak in front of the teacher for an hour and a half per school year. Kids who stayed with a host family in the UK might speak more English in their first weekend than they would during their entire scholarity.

                        Nou has kept her cousin's English manual from seconde (Y11). Published in 1976, it's a treasure of useless vocabulary and charmingly outdated expressions.

                        Comment


                          #37
                          I've lost count of the number of times someone said to me "Don't shrug your shoulders, you saucy boy!"

                          Comment


                            #38
                            Inevitably, it has become a bit of a catchphrase in our household, and has made us realise that we are both extremely saucy (that is to say, we do a lot of shoulder shrugging).

                            Comment


                              #39
                              Originally posted by Sam View Post

                              At the most basic level, I think so. I assume current UK schoolkids' experiences will be broadly the same as mine were: I was in school during the 1990s (I turned 6 in 1990 and 16 in 2000, so basically that decade is my pre-sixth-form school experience). I learnt no foreign languages in infants or junior schools (some of you will know these as a combined primary school; in my village it was two adjacent but different schools), and no English grammar beyond what verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives were. I already knew the no foreign-languages thing was a bit daft because two of my cousins (one two years older than me, one six months younger) were born and brought up in Barcelona and had started English classes pretty much when they started school (I mean obviously they didn't really need them given their mum was English, but I knew that schools in other countries did this a lot sooner than I was experiencing, is my point). I (and I probably wasn't alone) quickly realised there was a bit of stuff we'd not been told about grammar when, on my second day in Big School at the age of 12, I had my first French class and the teacher started throwing around technical grammatical terms as if we all obviously knew what they meant. Fuck knows why, she wasn't that old, she must have known we hadn't been taught that stuff – but her teaching of French was based on us knowing the names for the different tenses, and what the word 'conjugate' meant, and other stuff, and we didn't even have that to work with. And then a year later, still not actually having been taught any of that stuff, we started German, and bloody hell.
                              Exactly my school experience (without the cousins in Barcelona). I was aware when I started 'Big' school that most of the other kids had come from 'better' primary schools so figured that maybe they had been taught what conjugation etc was, but based on the experience of others here, they were probably as clueless as I was.

                              Comment


                                #40
                                A great thread this.

                                I wanted to learn a language when I was younger but then got put off when I was told it's too hard, try x.

                                I find that schools are so results focused they force students out.

                                We've just got a native Spanish speaker student join our school, no point her doing Spanish but the resistance from MFL teachers to her doing French is incredible. I've bargained to get her to try until half term and then we'll review.

                                This is the problem.

                                My Turkish exists because I wanted to understand Turkish football, it broadened because I had to speak to parents and then with other teachers who couldn't speak English. Now I'm teaching it to first and second generation Turkish speakers who struggle with the formal language. They tell me I speak posh Turkish, it's just standard rather than a regional dialect.

                                Comment


                                  #41
                                  Dunno why but I’d assumed you were a native speaker of Turkish, AE. Might be the ‘funny, foreign’ name

                                  Comment


                                    #42
                                    One under-rated plus for language learning is that the rules won't change much, not in your lifetime. If you were fluent in French in the 1950s, you might sound a bit quaint today but you could still talk about the weather and understand the news on telly. Whereas you might as well throw away your social science text books, and a lot of hard science/technology too.

                                    I admit I'm coming at this as a biased ex-language student, and science dunce, but still. Better a doctor with a lightning-struck postillion than one who hasn't discovered penicillin.

                                    Comment


                                      #43
                                      Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View Post
                                      Dunno why but I’d assumed you were a native speaker of Turkish, AE. Might be the ‘funny, foreign’ name
                                      Is my English that bad?

                                      Nope just a user name that means the Dragon from Antep, a nod to being from Wales and a fan of Gaziantepspor.

                                      Comment


                                        #44
                                        In Spain some schools use the CLIL technique, which is basically using the medium of English to teach subjects such as Maths, History or Physics (for example).

                                        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conten...ng#CLIL_origin

                                        It's not a bad idea as such but as one 14-year.old girl I was talking to today told me, the teacher ends up explaining something in English then immediately translating it, as most of the students haven't got the faintest idea what was being taught.

                                        Comment


                                          #45
                                          Yes, the teacher training campus that I am in charge of in Cambridge each summer (except of course 2020, etc etc), tends to have a couple of groups of teachers from Spain over who are involved in CLIL.

                                          I understand the rationale, but I think it;s ultimately flawed for the reasons you give. Some countries (most notably Malaysia) switched to an entirely CLIL curriculum some years ago and now most have reverted to some more hybrid model.

                                          Comment


                                            #46
                                            Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
                                            Nope just a user name that means the Dragon from Antep, a nod to being from Wales and a fan of Gaziantepspor.
                                            Oh, sure...now I can see it.

                                            Comment


                                              #47
                                              My son is doing social studies in Spanish (7th grade), but this isn't general practice at his school, only for the subset of students that were in the Spanish immersion elementary school.
                                              It's also his least favorite subject, though I suspect this might be mostly because the teacher is very eager and gives them more homework than the others, and more variety of tasks too.

                                              Comment


                                                #48
                                                Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                                Yes, the teacher training campus that I am in charge of in Cambridge each summer (except of course 2020, etc etc), tends to have a couple of groups of teachers from Spain over who are involved in CLIL.

                                                I understand the rationale, but I think it;s ultimately flawed for the reasons you give. Some countries (most notably Malaysia) switched to an entirely CLIL curriculum some years ago and now most have reverted to some more hybrid model.
                                                This is basically my job, teaching academic English to students new to English but who have to access the curriculum.

                                                Comment


                                                  #49
                                                  All the memories of modern languages at our place when I started in 89 came rushing back yesterday.
                                                  Teams call with a union member, shafted this summer doing last-minute EAP pre-sessional for the London campus, took a detour through how they’d much rather teach German, their chances of getting some evening sessions this semester at Durham etc
                                                  I guess the question of where they studied came up and it turned out 84-88 at our place so we then spent 20 mins reminiscing about the German team, all 3 now dead sadly and their penchant for DDR sources in the language lab.
                                                  The member still has cassettes from that era that were issued for Lang lab homework and so do I - in a box under my desk. I could recite some of the dict?es: Dieppe est une ville o? les visiteurs britanniques se sentent vite chez eux...

                                                  Comment


                                                    #50
                                                    Originally posted by ad hoc View Post

                                                    I think it's the value that society puts on language learning. We simply don't value it. It's increasingly an optional subject, and the message kids get is that that's it's not at the same level as STEM subjects or English language and literature or humanities or whatever. It's below even PE to be honest (at least PE is compulsory).
                                                    It’s really important to say “Anglophone society”
                                                    Every other country I’ve ever been to values teaching languages And most people speak usually some English and often another language too.

                                                    And the facility with English of so many people in Europe ( thanks in part to ad hoc and others on this board ) is astonishing.

                                                    between the wars German language department in universities had bee strong links to the secret services, as did Russian and Slavonic studies departments in the 50’s and 60’s.

                                                    In a post Brexit world are the foreigners going to continue to write and speak in English for British convenience?

                                                    how astonishing that schools have been allowed to m let the market decide how many people have a second language
                                                    ​​​​​​.

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