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Foreign languages in (Anglophone) schools | ||
Tags: School Education | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 35 18 March 2013 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Personally, I know more people who've found mathematics etc. more painful than languages - not that they were that fond of languages either, but there you have a kind of "direct" usefulness (=communicating with people) as opposed to rather abstract/remote usefulness (none of my schoolmates ever saw the point of algebra, solving equations, geometry, atomic theory... the list is almost endless). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emily96 Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4429 days ago 270 posts - 342 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Finnish, Latin | Message 26 of 35 18 March 2013 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been in a french immersion program for the past 5 (almost 6) years, and consider myself pretty adept in the
language. However, i also did a three month exchange to Quebec, which probably gives me a major advantage, and since i am interested in foreign languages i actively seek out ways to practice french outside of school. This is obviously not the case for most of my classmates. My best friend though i was crazy when i told her my reading list for spring break - all french and Italian books. My classmates have no trouble understanding the teacher's french, and can answer comprehensibly in the same language. We write essays and paragraphs and tests and do lit circles and read novels. Our accents are horrible, since we were taught by anglophones until very recently, but that is to be expected (it seems the best french speakers and in the early immersion program, which starts in first grade, because they always end up with the best accents). Those in the core french program are another story entirely, although they've learned more than i would have expected. Really, it depends on the student. I have a friend who loves the idea of speaking in french, so she will take the time to formulate a sentence to answer my random french outbursts, even if it's rarely perfect. Others treat the class as something they need to pass to graduate, and just barely scrape by. My Spanish class, on the other hand, has a complete range of levels. I had an advantage learning Spanish since i already knew french, so i find the class very easy. They can mostly follow along with the teacher's Spanish instructions, although answering in Spanish is pretty much out of the question. The text book exercises are very simplistic, but they are all topics relative to us as teenagers - family, school, travelling, free time, etc. I think we've been pretty lucky with our teacher, who's spent some time in Spain and travelling around latin america. She makes sure we have lots of listening and speaking practice.We practice conversations every day and brainstorm questions to ask each other (as well as how to answer them). Basically, it depends on the student and whether or not they're interested, and therefore willing to put the work in. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4735 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 35 20 March 2013 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Aside from the atomic theory part (which doesn't really come up in any depth at all until the second or third year of university work, and then only if you're in the right major for it), .... That's more an issue of kids (and math-phobic adults) not seeing the utility than of it not being there. Lots of real world things such as "the road sign just said my destination city is X miles away; on a highway with traffic flowing at Y miles per hour, how long until I should get there?" are algebra problems at heart. The algebra in that particular example is (to non-math-phobes) pretty trivial, but I've met a fair number of people can't do it (or at least never think to try). One of the better units of a math class that I ever took, in terms of driving home the idea that this stuff all really can and does apply to the real world, was one week in the middle of the geometry class that I took as a freshman in high school (that's when you're about 14 years old, for the non-Americans). We were given a bunch of real, physical world questions about things around the school, things that we had no good way to measure directly (like the height of the goal posts on the football field) and turned loose with tape measures and sextants during that class period for a week to figure them out. (As an aside, the detail that tripped up a fair percentage of the kids on the goal post question was forgetting to add back in the height above the ground that they were holding the sextant.) I think that the underlying reason for a lot of kids finding math painful in school is that they try treat it like their other subjects. I most subjects (at the primary and secondary levels, anyway) if you miss one or two things (for example, while out sick) it has a pretty minimal impact on your ability to pick up the following lesson. Not spending much time with one weeks vocabulary list doesn't do much damage to your ability to pick up the next week's vocabulary list, for example. Math tends to be much more a matter of constantly building on what has gone before. So trying to do the next week's lesson before mastering the previous week's material is more prone to being a little bit like trying to build the fourth floor of a building before building the third floor. If a kid tries to just quickly skim over material that they missed when they were sick, or settle for only kinda - sorta understanding a particular bit that gives them some trouble, in most of their classes they can still be OK overall. In math, doing that tends to lead to almost everything afterward seeming progressively less comprehensible to them. Edited by PillowRock on 20 March 2013 at 8:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 28 of 35 20 March 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The key factor to do good at anything is motivation and good luck motivating 15-year-olds to do math problems about subjects they're not interested in. Pretty much anyone who was ever successful at anything had the drive to succeed.
I was not a poor student by any means, but I can tell you that of all the things I learned at school I don't even use 1%. Anything I do well, I do because I put the time in. If we want more people able to speak French, we need to make them see the usefulness of speaking French and provide this in a context they can work with. Edited by tarvos on 20 March 2013 at 9:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 35 20 March 2013 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@PillowRock
My (imaginary) "endless list" included things from other subjects, like monarchs, historical battles, photosynthesis, so again, I suppose that if the kids don't find a subject useful or practical in the "direct" sense (or at all), it's highly unlikely that they'll put in the hours other than to just pass the test. As Марк wrote: "Biology, chemistry, physics, geography, history, literature - they all are quite useless to most people." And as several have said previously in the thread, in some countries there's a major foreign language which is of some importance whether you need it to "survive", to attend university, to do business in the street market, to go on holiday, to watch movies/read books.... In many countries, this language is English. In other parts of the world, it might be Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, French... (and I'm sure that kids learn the foreign language if there's some use for it). Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 21 March 2013 at 10:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 30 of 35 21 March 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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Even Swahili in East Africa for example.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5542 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 31 of 35 25 March 2013 at 7:08am | IP Logged | |||||
To me it's important to talk specifically about schools in countries where English is the primary language spoken (whether or not it's one of the official languages - see the US) because currently English is the lingua franca. It's arguable that many people, at least in the US, believe that they don't need to learn how to speak a language other than English because the vast majoirty of business, trade, academics, etc are done in English. This is different than say, teaching a foreign language in Spain where the official languages aren't the lingua franca. Presumably some people and a significant number of educational policy makers believe that it is important to teach and learn English because English is the lingua franca as opposed to Spanish. The same can be said for any country where English isn't the dominant language culturally. In the US, and I'm sure a fair amount of other countries where English is the domeinant language, the vast majority of students aren't offered a language in school until they are in 9th grade. That is very different than, say, Sweden, where English is taught very early in schools. Additionally in the US (and I know that this isn't the same for all countries where English is the domeinant language) the government isn't in control over exactly what topics students are being taught and when. Does the US government mandate that students be taught English, math, science, and history (among other things)? Yes. Does it say that students have to learn about the US' role in WWII - no. (Here's an interersting link about it - http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ous/international/usne i/us/standards.doc ) Basically the notion of why foreign languages should be taught in schools and the importance of teaching them varies differently from countries where English is the primary language of communication to countries where English is not the primary language of communication. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| wber Groupie United States Joined 4302 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese, French | Message 32 of 35 25 March 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Studying a language and hearing it spoken by a native person in real-life are two different things. I had a relative who came over from France to visit us. On the way, her cellphone rang and she was talking to her friend in French, and it was really fast. I could barely make out a word. Of course when she spoke slowly, I could understand a little bit I'm wondering if this is a trend or something? I've always felt that European variety is always spoken faster than their North American counterparts. Quebec French vs Parisian French, Latin American Spanish vs European Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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