I try very hard to be an optimist
and I genuinely think that in many - indeed in most - ways, the world has
become a significantly better place over my lifetime. However, there is always stuff
going on to counter that rose-tinted view of the world, both in my own life and
in the wider world, and just occasionally things crop up which make me succumb to
feelings of doom and gloom.
One such thing greeted me in this
morning’s news (February 27th 2019), with the not exactly surprising
revelation that language learning here in the UK appears to be in meteoric
decline, according to a survey by BBC news. The story is here:
For a linguist it makes
depressing reading, and it is difficult to resist the temptation to link this
apparent decline in our willingness as a nation to engage with the language and
culture of other countries as symptomatic of the same narrow-minded insularity
that drove a (very slim) majority of Britons to vote to leave the EU back in
2016.
As a retired languages teacher, I
am relieved to say that this is now for me just a subject of deep concern, rather
than one of professional survival, but that doesn’t mean to say that I am
not very sad to see it happening. We Brits have always been bad at it, but why
are we getting worse at learning languages? And why are we not more worried
about it? In short, why are we so arrogant?
When I graduated and came into
language teaching in the early 80s, the future for language learning looked
bright. We were relatively new members of the EU, and as a nation we were
rapidly becoming more familiar with our European neighbours thanks to easier
communications, the boom in foreign holidays, growth in trade and a love affair
with cuisine more interesting than the “boiled beef and carrots” on which our parents’
generation had been raised. It’s very hard to believe now, but pizza and pasta
were exotic rarities as recently as the 1970s, whilst wine was a drink for the
well-to-do or for special occasions, and baguettes, croissants and quiche were
words encountered only in French lessons at school. Languages were valued and booming in
schools, and a move away from élitist grammar-based teaching, with more emphasis
on practical communication skills - listening and speaking - promised a bright
future for the subject.
That’s the way it was in the
first 25 years of my teaching career: modern languages (in the case of my
school French and German) were part of the core curriculum alongside Maths
English and the sciences and whilst some didn’t like them and weren’t very good
at them, there was a feeling that, like Maths, language learning was somehow “good for you”. For me, a pragmatic and good-humoured approach to teaching, combined with giving pupils the opportunities
for fun trips to foreign parts, made it relatively easy, and certainly
enjoyable, to teach languages.
In my small school, with around
100 in each year group, all pupils took GCSE French or German, and A-Level
entries of between 10 and 20 for my main language, French were the norm as
recently as the early 2000s, with many of these going on to read the
subject at university.
So what has gone so badly wrong
with language learning, and in such a short time? These days, taking a language to GCSE has become just an option, taken up by just a few keenies, and as a result, A-Level language teachers
in many schools and colleges often struggle to recruit more than a handful of
candidates, with formerly mainstream languages like German having become the preserve
of a tiny minority, as confirmed in today’s news report.
Part of the answer lies in a perfectly
laudable broadening of the curriculum over recent decades: more apparently
attractive, relevant and - dare I say - easier
subjects like Business Studies, Psychology, Photography, Physical Education and
Media Studies have all proved to be an irresistible temptation to pupils
burdened with a “must pass” core of English, Maths and the sciences. Moreover, some
very poor choices made by the exam boards who devise specifications at GCSE and A-Level
have served to make languages statistically a very risky choice for pupils,
with top grades elusive. This, combined with schools leaders’ nervous pursuit
of league table success has led to a “perfect storm” for languages in schools.
This is very, very sad, and in my
opinion very damaging to our long-term success and well-being as a society, at
two distinct levels:
The first is self-evident and
practical: our unwillingness to engage with the language and culture of other
countries is deeply harmful to trade and business. We hide behind the excuse
that “everybody speaks English”, failing to realise that the wheels of commerce
are driven by human interaction and good manners, which often amount to no more than making an effort to meet others halfway. Yes, the detailed negotiations
for that lucrative contract may be carried out in English, but the small-talk
and goodwill that underpin it may be immeasurably strengthened by a simple
greeting in the language of the host, or maybe a “please” and a “thank you” at mealtimes or
a comment about the weather. It’s amazing how much ice can be broken by trying
to use just a bit of school-level language.
And please don’t tell me that
speaking another language is difficult: much of the rest of the world is
bilingual, and we are reminded all the time by the many lovely and capable people
from across Europe who have in recent years come to live and work in our
country how easy it is to become fluent in English, one of the subtlest,
richest and most illogical of all languages. We all meet them every day: think of that
every time you are served in a restaurant or a coffee shop, helped recover from
illness by a doctor or nurse in hospital or greeted by a hotel receptionist,
many of whom are non-native speakers of English.
Or how about footballers and
their managers? Is there a better and more expressive user of English than Jürgen
Klopp? Does anyone in Manchester speak better “Manc” than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer?
These guys, and those who play for them have mastered our language because they
have lived and worked here and absorbed our culture, not because they took school
and university examinations.
Which brings me to the second
reason for valuing language learning, a less obvious but equally important one. Yes, we
need to be far better at the practical business of communicating in other
languages, but what about the hidden benefits of language learning, beyond the obvious ones?
Language learning has multiple subtle
benefits, way beyond the straightforward business of communicating. Thanks to
the previous successes of our education system, the highest levels of every
profession here in the UK are massively enriched by the presence of linguists, who benefit
enormously from the subtle transferred skills derived from their knowledge of
another language. Among my ex-students of A-Level French are numerous doctors, engineers,
scientists, business people and teachers, as well as actors and media
journalists, all of whom probably seldom if ever use their A-Level French, yet
still benefit from it every day. Modern linguists, and their close counterparts
classicists, are everywhere in the professions, but I fear that they will
become fewer in number over time, and those professions will be the poorer for
it. It came as no surprise to me when I discovered recently through my post-retirement work in the diabetes community that the Chief
Executives of the two main diabetes charities in the UK, JDRF and Diabetes UK
are, respectively, a Cambridge linguist and an Oxford classicist.
I took a degree in French and
German at Oxford University, yet my ability to speak fluent and colloquial
French comes not from my studies at Oxford, but from a year spent living and
working in a small town in rural France where nobody spoke English, and playing
for a non-league football team there. However, this is not to belittle
my Oxford languages degree, far from it: studying for a traditional university degree in Modern
Languages, with its emphasis on detailed translation of literary texts, and above
all the reading and critical analysis of vast quantities of literature in the
original language has given me skills such as absorbing and processing information,
understanding a variety of viewpoints, and writing concise and focused English
which served me well throughout my professional career and continue to do so in my
post-retirement work in healthcare advocacy.
I very much hope that we can
arrest the decline in language learning before it gets too late, but at the
risk of concluding on a gloomy note, I fear the damage has already been done. I
am loathe to politicise this issue, but it is difficult not to see a connection
between the mentality of Brexit and that of our unwillingness to prioritise and
promote language learning. Perhaps we are at the darkest hour just before dawn,
and if a post-Brexit Britain is left marginalised, as well as culturally and
materially impoverished by the short-sighted and misguided decision of a particular
generation, perhaps future generations can right this wrong. I hope so.
Oh, so what's the song title for
this post, as is my wont? It’s almost impossible to find a song about languages, so I’ve
settled for a wonderful Simon and Garfunkel song whose lyrics I profoundly
disagree with, yet whose title sums up where we seem to be heading.
Great song,
shame about the meaning: I am a Rock
