There are plenty of linguistic things I could rant about on my first blog post of 2016. Perhaps I could poke fun at Larry Lamb and the British Council's drive to get people in the UK to learn a foreign language while UK politicians continue to do the hokey cokey on the subject of the country's membership of the EU. Rather than looking outwards and promoting the benefits of stronger engagement with our European neighbours and their languages, many of our deluded politicians demonstrate how isolationist you can choose to be if you live on an island.
At a house party over Christmas, a friend's sister excitedly told me how her 12-year-old daughter had recently shown talent and enthusiasm for learning German. Should I ever meet the 12-year-old, I have been instructed to chat to her in German - which I would be delighted to do. This is how any language-learning drive should work. Don't tell working adults with established careers, families, commitments and other distractions to learn a few phrases a day in another language - tell and encourage 11 and 12-year olds! They have more time and a stronger motivation. It is only by training them to become language graduates in a decade's time that the UK will have any hope of addressing the UK's multilingual malaise and missed trade opportunities. The sad reality, of course, is that language learning is on the wane in schools and universities and few people seem to care.
But I won't rant about that! I won't even rant about the new idea that forcing members of non-Christian minority groups to learn English will be an effective tool in tackling segregation and radicalisation. It's a confusing proposal, given that segregation rarely occurs due to language alone. Secondly, the majority of recent evil acts or excursions falling into this category were carried out by those who seemed perfectly able to speak either English or the language of the European country where they were based. I won't even highlight the plight of the many UK-based TEFL teachers who, according to writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen, have been made redundant in huge numbers over recent years - only to witness this apparent volte-face now that the political elite have suddenly decided that teaching English is a good idea, supported by £20m in funding.
I won't rant about 10-year-old schoolchildren who live in terraced houses and who inadvertently misspell the word and spark major police investigations as a result. In fact, I won't rant about anything today because I think this embarrassing error by a government department tells us everything we need to know about how important languages are in the UK.
Showing posts with label foreign language learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign language learning. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 January 2016
Monday, 14 July 2014
Languages in a lamentable state (Part 2)
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog entry entitled Languages in a lamentable state – that state being, of course, the UK. This morning a BBC News article outlines renewed efforts to address the country's woeful inability to learn and use foreign languages and feel once again compelled to comment. So there's a cross-party group and we have phrases like "national recovery programme for languages" and "driving a languages revival" being bandied around. So far, so meaningless.
For once, at least, we now have a few figures to quantify the scale of the problem and proposals offered by the All-Party Parliamentary Group's chairman, Baroness Coussins, to tackle it:
"The UK economy is already losing around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce.
"And we aren't just talking about high-flyers: in 2011 over 27% of admin and clerical jobs went unfilled because of the languages deficit."
To me, these two statements perfectly illustrate the lack of understanding of the issues. We all know what the difference between a "high-flyer" and someone doing an admin and clerical job is, don't we? No, actually, we don't – and neither do the politicians. This is because, historically, the advantages of being able to use a foreign language competently and professionally are never outlined. As a result, investing the time required to learn a language to graduate level might even be seen as naive in some quarters. You can set up all the MPs' talking shops you like, it's now been fifteen years since I graduated; yet online job sites are still flooded with customer service positions (file under 'admin and clerical') offering the same £17k p.a. that they were paying in 1999. And if the country really is losing billions in lost contracts to the UK's multilingual competitors, then this is surely evidence that no-one in the UK really cares, anyway.
But fear not, foreign-language friends – help is on its way:
"The Department for Education said £350,000 was being spent in England in the next year to help primary and secondary teachers improve their teaching of languages."
Clearly we can spend the equivalent of around ten teachers' modest full-time salaries to cover the whole of England and the problem will go away. Get a good and enthusiastic linguist teaching in a primary school and you might – just might – have a handful of young people taking a foreign language at GCSE or 'A' Level a decade or so later. If you're very lucky, one or two may even study languages at university. But that's wishful thinking:
"A spokesman added: "We are making it compulsory for children to learn a foreign language from age seven to 14, a move supported by 91% of respondents to our consultation on languages in primary schools."
The above statement shows that although just under half of state-school pupils go on to take a GCSE in a foreign language (itself an appalling statistic, especially when we don't know how many of them actually pass with a good grade); there is no intention to make studying a foreign language up to GCSE at age 16 compulsory. Numbers of students studying languages at university will continue to decline. So unless you can get young people with (pre-) GCSE-level French, German, Spanish or Italian to man the phones in customer service jobs, those contracts will still be lost and the state of foreign language learning in the UK will go from lamentable to, frankly, laughable.
For once, at least, we now have a few figures to quantify the scale of the problem and proposals offered by the All-Party Parliamentary Group's chairman, Baroness Coussins, to tackle it:
"The UK economy is already losing around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce.
"And we aren't just talking about high-flyers: in 2011 over 27% of admin and clerical jobs went unfilled because of the languages deficit."
To me, these two statements perfectly illustrate the lack of understanding of the issues. We all know what the difference between a "high-flyer" and someone doing an admin and clerical job is, don't we? No, actually, we don't – and neither do the politicians. This is because, historically, the advantages of being able to use a foreign language competently and professionally are never outlined. As a result, investing the time required to learn a language to graduate level might even be seen as naive in some quarters. You can set up all the MPs' talking shops you like, it's now been fifteen years since I graduated; yet online job sites are still flooded with customer service positions (file under 'admin and clerical') offering the same £17k p.a. that they were paying in 1999. And if the country really is losing billions in lost contracts to the UK's multilingual competitors, then this is surely evidence that no-one in the UK really cares, anyway.
But fear not, foreign-language friends – help is on its way:
"The Department for Education said £350,000 was being spent in England in the next year to help primary and secondary teachers improve their teaching of languages."
Clearly we can spend the equivalent of around ten teachers' modest full-time salaries to cover the whole of England and the problem will go away. Get a good and enthusiastic linguist teaching in a primary school and you might – just might – have a handful of young people taking a foreign language at GCSE or 'A' Level a decade or so later. If you're very lucky, one or two may even study languages at university. But that's wishful thinking:
"A spokesman added: "We are making it compulsory for children to learn a foreign language from age seven to 14, a move supported by 91% of respondents to our consultation on languages in primary schools."
The above statement shows that although just under half of state-school pupils go on to take a GCSE in a foreign language (itself an appalling statistic, especially when we don't know how many of them actually pass with a good grade); there is no intention to make studying a foreign language up to GCSE at age 16 compulsory. Numbers of students studying languages at university will continue to decline. So unless you can get young people with (pre-) GCSE-level French, German, Spanish or Italian to man the phones in customer service jobs, those contracts will still be lost and the state of foreign language learning in the UK will go from lamentable to, frankly, laughable.
Saturday, 1 February 2014
Languages in a lamentable state
Yet again we read in The Guardian that UK applications to study languages are falling. Quelle surprise! We read of the confusing picture of the growing commercial need for businesses to have polyglots on the staff, against the inevitable consequence of modern foreign languages being completely optional rather than compulsory school subjects since 2004.
Que faire? What should we do? Well, clearly no-one is worried enough to actually do very much at all, it seems. University language departments are being allowed to be closed or merged in response to the falling demand for specific languages. Are those businesses requiring languages actually going into schools to 'sell' that desperate need to the nation's first and second-year high school pupils? Probably not. Perhaps if a company director were to change their own mindset and explain to young people how languages are an essential requirement (rather than a handy, exotic add-on), we might see some progress. How many bosses are polyglots themselves? How can they inspire people when the UK's attitude towards jobs for linguists rarely extends beyond the stultifying world of multilingual customer service? As a new graduate with no professional teaching or translation experience, selling stuff in another language was the only option available to me.
Learning foreign languages is also a lifelong process. It does not sit well with the culture of instant gratification the UK demands and expects. The game of gaining qualifications in the UK is characterised by relatively short bursts of intensive study (two years for GCSEs, another two years for A Levels, three years minimum for a degree). When students' parents here in Switzerland ask me how long I've been learning German, my honest answer is now: "About 25 years". I'm still learning. I will never stop learning. It is impossible to completely master the linguistic and cultural totality of a language that is not one's mother tongue. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try!
Que faire? What should we do? Well, clearly no-one is worried enough to actually do very much at all, it seems. University language departments are being allowed to be closed or merged in response to the falling demand for specific languages. Are those businesses requiring languages actually going into schools to 'sell' that desperate need to the nation's first and second-year high school pupils? Probably not. Perhaps if a company director were to change their own mindset and explain to young people how languages are an essential requirement (rather than a handy, exotic add-on), we might see some progress. How many bosses are polyglots themselves? How can they inspire people when the UK's attitude towards jobs for linguists rarely extends beyond the stultifying world of multilingual customer service? As a new graduate with no professional teaching or translation experience, selling stuff in another language was the only option available to me.
Learning foreign languages is also a lifelong process. It does not sit well with the culture of instant gratification the UK demands and expects. The game of gaining qualifications in the UK is characterised by relatively short bursts of intensive study (two years for GCSEs, another two years for A Levels, three years minimum for a degree). When students' parents here in Switzerland ask me how long I've been learning German, my honest answer is now: "About 25 years". I'm still learning. I will never stop learning. It is impossible to completely master the linguistic and cultural totality of a language that is not one's mother tongue. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try!
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