BBC Article: Language Teachers needed (Languages & Work) Language Learning Forum

BBC Article: Language Teachers needed
Tags: Language Teaching \| Press Article
Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work

19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

William Camden
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Message 17 of 19

16 March 2012 at 3:13pm | IP Logged

stelingo wrote:

William Camden wrote:

The trends in Britain at any rate have been to downgrade language teaching (I understand some time back that taking a language at school used to be compulsory but this was ended). In a time of economic crisis I don't expect this trend to be reversed.

English secondary schools are judged on how well they are performing in league tables. One of the new criteria is the percentage of pupils who gain the English baccalaureate, which means achieving grade C or higher in Maths, English, Science, Geography or History and a Modern Foreign language. This has meant that schools which made the study of an MFL optional in recent years, are now making it compulsory again. Hence the need for more MFL teachers.

The trend to make languages optional was certainly visible under the Labour government, but that was a number of years back. It may be that with a new government, priorities have changed.

Regardless, I don't think foreign languages are taught well in British schools as a rule, and pupils in any case often have an attitude problem - "Everybody speaks English anyway etc."
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William Camden
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6274 days ago
1936 posts - 2333 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French

Message 18 of 19

16 March 2012 at 3:19pm | IP Logged

crafedog wrote:

Марк wrote:

crafedog wrote:

Teach in a school in England? Yuck, yuck, yuck (and I
actually am a
language teacher -
English as a foreign language). I can still remember my schooldays and how rubbish my
school was/the students were.

What was wrong?

The school was just very poor. Lazy, uninspiring teachers with violent, crazy, criminal
students. I have very few good memories of school apart from the time I spent with my
friends outside of it. I never enjoyed education until I went to university.

Some of my teachers were good, some frankly bad and most unmemorable. As to the other inmates of the abode of learning, I vividly remember being threatened with a knife by one of them. I was nine. So was he.
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montmorency
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United Kingdom
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Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

Message 19 of 19

18 March 2012 at 6:39pm | IP Logged

William Camden wrote:

The trends in Britain at any rate have been to downgrade
language teaching (I understand some time back that taking a language at school used to
be compulsory but this was ended). In a time of economic crisis I don't expect this
trend to be reversed.

It's one of the many things that make me despair of my native country.
Over the years, the political and educational establishment has waves of getting
enthusiastic about languages, and then for whatever reason (often financial, sometimes
ideological) the enthusiasm wanes. We go from one extreme to another almost (well, at
least from mediocre to crap; I'm not sure we ever hit "excellent" in terms of language,
except at a small number of schools).

Education in England is such a political football, and within education, language
teaching is the Cinderella subject.

We/they need to try to be clear about what education is actually for and what modern
language learning is actually for (and if that includes "as an academic end in itself",
that would be fine by me, but not acceptable in today's Philistine climate).

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