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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4625 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 17 15 July 2012 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||
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There are huge numbers of people from Britain and America who studied a foreign language (typically French, German or Spanish) at school for a few years, yet are unable to construct a sentence in this language in adult life.
Yes, English has become a global lingua-franca and most native English speakers assume they will never need a foreign language. But the fact remains that they had regular lessons in a subject over a fair amount of time yet seem to have gained little from their learning experience. Is it purely down to kids not being interested or does the teaching approach fail the pupils? Perhaps too much reading and writing, not enough speaking? I work as a maths teacher and I have occasionally supervised a language class when a colleague has been out of school. I have little to offer in a French classroom but I am pretty fluent in German. It absolutely astonishes me how reluctant the kids are to try and speak German. Even the top-end classes suffer from this problem. You ask a pupil a question in German and are met with a blank stare. Asking them to orally translate a simple sentence from English to German is often fruitless. Most of the work seems to involve written exercises with a dictionary on every desk. Is this the right approach? I'm not expecting schools to churn out armies of French speakers but surely we should be getting kids to converse confidently at a basic level? Maybe my expectations are unrealistic. I know in Ireland they have spent the last 90 years teaching Irish to all children all the way through school yet the spoken proficiency of the language among the general population is abysmal. Former Soviet satellite states taught Russian as a compulsory subject but few people cared for it. I gather Finnish kids aren't too enthusiastic about learning Swedish. The list is endless, but I feel English-speaking nations come off worst. Edited by beano on 15 July 2012 at 11:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 17 15 July 2012 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||
In the US, five years of junior high and high school French, with the final year an Advanced Placement French class, will allow the more diligent and interested students to pass the AP French exam, which allegedly corresponds to the DELF B1. At this level, they should be able to carry on conversations about concrete, familiar subjects with a moderate amount of difficulty, and mostly understand clear, spoken French aimed at them by a native speaker. So if you're dealing with average students who've had two years of French, well, they're probably still down around A1, low A2. Unless the teacher has relied almost exclusively on conversational methods, they're generally not going to be able to handle basic conversation. Many European countries don't do much better—they just add more years. I know plenty of young European professionals who spent a decade in English class, and a few years out of school, many of them are somewhere between B1 and B2 in conversation. A few are much higher in work-related reading. The major exceptions are the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where they get 10 years of English and vast quantities of English media. There, it's not at all surprising to run into highly-fluent English speakers. From another perspective, this is all pretty sad. If you took the class and homework hours dedicated to French 1, many students could complete a course like Assimil and start reading easy native materials and practicing conversation by the end of the year. So there's clearly room for improvement. Beats me how this could be pulled off in the classroom, though—maybe an Honors French I class with highly motivated students, the right teacher, and some benign neglect from the school administrators could figure it out. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kyle Corrie Senior Member United States Joined 4832 days ago 175 posts - 464 votes | Message 3 of 17 15 July 2012 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most people can't tell you what a direct object is any more than they can explain what
a Lagrangian function is because it never interested them and they never really had a need to know it. In English speaking countries you'll (probably) never have anyone approach you and begin speaking in a language besides English; nor will a foreigner (typically) walk into a restaurant and begin ordering in any language other than English. However, I've seen first hand in Austria and Germany for example where people simply approach a counter and begin ordering in English without even asking if the person is able to understand. Languages are the same as any subject in school. If you don't have a desire to truly learn something then you won't and in English speaking countries there is essentially no real need to learn it. That doesn't make them bad language learners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5568 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 4 of 17 15 July 2012 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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In UK state schools you generally start French at 11 and get 2 45 minute lessons a week
in term, with about 15 minutes homework per lesson - you then have the option to learn another European language at 13, again getting 2 45 minute lessons a week and at 14 you can give up languages if you so choose or continue. There are about 20-40 students per class at this level. It comes as no surprise therefore that language teaching between 11-14 is just to give a taster to students who wish to continue to GCSE (which does go to A2) and A level (which takes a student to B1) or to fill the day for the rest. I initially gave up French at 14 and, despite being in the top set of students, was no where near what is now required for DELF A1 after those 3 years. In fact I remember we spent most of the time listening to tapes (where, comically, there were 2 speakers putting on about 6 voices) and ticking boxes when we heard the use of a verb or a noun. Edited by Elexi on 15 July 2012 at 2:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4720 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 5 of 17 15 July 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Growing up in the US, I learned I hate the sound of Spanish. Why is it that I should have to learn Spanish just because many people come across the border from Mexico? If I had to learn a foreign language, I thought I should be free to choose the one I like. The problem is the only language classes available in school when I was a kid were European (and therefore easy). I wanted something more exotic, but I settled for German because of all the European languages, it sounded the coolest.
I threw myself into it. I borrowed all the books I could find in the libraries and read through them intensely. Not for school, but because it became an obsession of mine. I just love memorizing huge amounts of information about my obsessions. At that point, I hadn't even taken a German class in school. By the time I took a class in middle school, I was far ahead of my classmates. I already knew everything that was being taught in class, so I would spend my time reading through the class's textbooks. I would ask the teacher if I could take them home with me, and she let me. In my free time at home, I would read through them. This is basically my idea of fun. Let me be clear that I read a lot of textbooks, but didn't get to listen to a lot of speech. I didn't have internet access, and finding library videos of German being spoken was hard. I wasn’t good at speaking or listening. I did, however, constantly try to use German around the house and I tried to teach it to my siblings even if my pronunciation was off. In class, I was basically the only one with the confidence and skills to understand the teacher’s German, make up new sentences on the spot and speak out loud in front of class. I am not magical. There is no mystery about why I was succeeding and my classmates weren't. No studies need to be conducted. I loved learning German vocabulary and grammar, while the others liked having a social life. Is it really that important to you guys that all people around the world be multi-lingual? If you feel that it is immoral for a person to not learn a foreign language, you must be prepared to be bold and discourage people from not using their free time to study the language of their choice. If enough people start doing this, the whole world will change. I’m not prepared to make that moral statement, however, because in the end all languages are arbitrary creations. The language you speak isn’t as important to me as the physical actions you take. Though, I will say it is morally good for a person to work hard at something (mentally or physically). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4706 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 6 of 17 15 July 2012 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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My experiences learning French in school were actually quite good. We had regular oral
exams and had to present in French to the class about a short article we'd read every week. You could still basically memorize what you were going to say, but you did have to speak. We also did a lot of written reading responses. By the time high school was over I'd taken French for six years and was probably at a solid B1. Basic conversation was definitely part of my repertoire at that time. I've had no use for French in the past three years and, yeah, now couldn't string together a complex sentence in the language if my life depended on it. But I'm actually still very happy with my high school education because it gave me a good foundation regarding how to learn. Information about what the gender of "fromage" is and when to use "dont" is trivia. I don't mind if I forget it over time, just like I've forgotten the value of e to five digits and how much a mole in chemistry is. What it comes down to is that, when I needed to learn another language, I already had a rough guide from high school French and that helped a lot. I knew basic grammar concepts, I knew the concepts of verb conjugation and tenses, and I had very elementary strategies for acquiring vocabulary. Did that bring me up to basic fluency in Dutch all by itself? No, but it was a very good start. So here's a perspective from someone who wasn't failed by their high school language teachers! Although I can no longer speak French, I'm sure they'd be plenty happy with what I've been able to do with language learning since. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4831 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 17 15 July 2012 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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The British kids the OP describes would probably be exactly the right candidate group
who could benefit from a Michel Thomas-type approach. Not that alone, but a good bit of it. It would help to coax them out of their unwillingness to speak. They would need to have the right sort of teacher though, and be in quite small groups. Unwillingness to be mocked by their peer group is probably what puts a lot of them off. They also have to be motivated to want to do it. I don't have the answer to that, but I am sure answers can be discovered. Edited by montmorency on 15 July 2012 at 11:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 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 8 of 17 16 July 2012 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Here's the deal - most people don't care, and only learn what they learn out of
necessity. The only reason Scandinavians and Dutch people seem to be keen on English is because we realized a long time ago that Dutch or Norwegian alone wouldn't cut it, so most of us decided that one of the most influential languages of all time would be a good candidate for us to learn. By the way, there's quite a proportion of Dutch people who haven't even achieved a B2-level fluency in Dutch. B1/lower can be quite common depending on social class and things like that. The one thing that always cracks me up about Dutch people going abroad for holidays and such is their commentary of "the staff and locals don't seem to speak English". Apparently we've given up on knowing whether they speak Dutch and prefer to be shifted in with the English bag. I remember a reporter that went to Ukraine for Euro 2012 saying something like "the people are really friendly, but sadly not a word of English" , going off the assumption that apparently any Dutch person should know English for travel purposes. Edited by tarvos on 16 July 2012 at 12:57am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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