Can Education Save the UK from a Future in Linguistic Purgatory?
Did you know that the number of school kids who sat a modern language GCSE in 2010 was just 273,000, compared to 444,700 in 1998?
It is dramatic statistics such as this which appear to have put a shot in the arm of the education part of the government and other educationalists in the UK. For example, education brain (and Tony Blair’s biographer interestingly) Anthony Seldon of Wellington College, Berkshire, believes that Britain has a problem in that it is getting steadily more and more multicultural and yet less interested in learning languages, meaning that in future we are going to be less competitive in an increasingly globalised world.
His advice for how we should reverse this potentially disastrous trend is as follows:
· Expand the number of languages offered – in particular to include Urdu, Arabic and Mandarin
· Language teaching should be incorporated into other subjects – e.g. teach French numbers as part of early maths classes
· Get business owners with international experience (e.g. exports) to come in and explain to kids how important it is to learn a language
His ideas put into practice would hopefully encourage young people to take up languages that will prove useful in the future for a range of purposes including business, and pick them up more easily thanks to them being woven into other subjects.
Conservative Approach
Around about the same time, Education Secretary Michael Gove, in the run up to the Conservative Conference, who has been criticised in the past for scrapping the British Council’s language assistant scheme (now reinstated), was proposing that children as young as 5 should be learning a foreign language. In the same interview he also talked about incorporating languages into more school subjects and how many other countries teach their young children foreign languages, so why can’t we? With better primary school resources for languages and early years toys designed to assist with linguistic advancement then there are certainly many methods which could be employed to engrain this in children from an early age.
In practical terms he accepted that it would not be easy, but explained that with better teacher training and perhaps even longer school days it would be possible.
Are we doomed?
Well, no of course we are not doomed to a future where our children are at a global disadvantage. English is still one of the languages in the world with the biggest global spread, and one which is the second language of choice for many countries.
The point is that the decisions made by the government regarding teaching languages in schools are going to have a big impact; understandably an impact in several years’ time when any changes actually come into place, possibly when a new government is in power with plans to change the education system again, but a big impact none the less.
Do you think learning a foreign language will have a big impact on our children’s lives?