It is fair to say that, from a global perspective, I have often heard British people being dismissed as lazy, or even arrogant when it comes to learning languages.
There are embarrassing stereotypes of British holiday makers ignorantly shouting in English at Spanish waiters for example, hoping that might be a solution
However, I think it is actually a fairly modern phenomenon. Even if we were to just take a glimpse at the history of the British Isles, we come to understand that Britain's multilingual history, with its indigenous Celtic languages and the languages of conquest (Roman, Viking and Norman), it is clear that at least some informal language learning must have been taking place. We also have evidence of formal language teaching in the form of bilingual English–Latin dialogues for monks around 1000 A.D and after the Norman Conquest in 1066 French was introduced. It has been the ‘first’ foreign language for most British children ever since. German became popular in the eighteenth century, helped by the prestige associated with the fact that Britain's monarchs from 1714 were from the German House of Hanover. In 1858, Oxford and Cambridge Universities introduced public examinations to be taken by pupils at age 16 and 18 and French and German were among the subjects offered.
So, when did this all change?
Over the past 15 years entries for foreign language GCSE’S (General Certificate of Education taken at 16) in England’s secondary schools have fallen by 48%, with German down 65% and French down 62%. (The Guardian 11 May 2019).
UK Exams regulator Ofqual has been accused of ‘killing off languages’ and language teachers have known for a long time that GCSE and A-level exams have been subject to harder marking criteria than other subject.
Languages are very different to many other subjects on the curriculum, yet they suffer the same right/wrong task types, objective approach, inflexible assessment criteria and level boundaries as, dare I say it, less creative subjects. (Leading education expert Alan Smithers of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, August 2019).
For me, teaching English as the foreign language, I can now see far more clearly how Language learning standards introduced in the UK over recent years have impacted on how English is taught overseas.
Currently, there is a trend for grammar to be side-lined in favour of learning a language ‘like a native’. Lovely as that sounds, unless you are fully immersed in the language, this is near impossible, albeit with a few exceptions.
Over the years I have met highly motivated students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have become fantastically fluent simply by watching American TV shows, comedy clips on youtube and learning song lyrics. Nevertheless, most need some help in speeding up their fluency, accuracy and comprehension with basic rules. So, in my opinion, to think that completely dumping grammar helps is, in my view, at best naïve and at worst impractical.
However, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand, grammar is seemingly out of fashion, yet the assessment criteria for most schools across the world is based on accuracy of grammar. This seems to be the position internationally within the CEFR (Central European Reference Framework) for measuring all foreign language levels.
Students are clearly disillusioned. In the UK the number of modern languages undergraduates fell by 54% in the ten years between 2008 and 2018. With fewer students applying, at least nine modern languages departments have closed in the last decade, and many others have shrunk in size or reduced their range of languages. The number of German departments has halved from more than 80 in 2002 to fewer than 40 today. (The Guardian 19 June 2019)
This is not because the British think ‘Everybody speaks English’. In a letter to The Guardian newspaper 152 academics – from 36 universities – warn that the exams are graded too severely and the stress for pupils is “disproportionate”.
“They will have to sit excessively difficult exams and accept that their grade may well end up lower than their performance deserves,” the letter says. “Where’s the incentive to choose a language if you’re systematically made to feel rubbish at it?”
Nicola McClelland, Professor of German and History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham continues, “Yet we need subject specialists with language skills – lawyers, economists, geographers, engineers, and business graduates with the language skills to understand, negotiate, and argue the details on a global platform.”
Clearly, this has been the motivation for all global economies. Most nations, whether they actually agree with it or not, accept the fact that English is now accepted as the common language with which to communicate. At the very top of the list is a motivation for economic growth and even historically reluctant countries are now adopting English language learning as a priority. South America is a good example.
However, money and economics are not the only factor – at least not for ordinary people.
I first started teaching IELTS online and 85% of my students in 2015 and 2016 were from Latin American countries. The Olympics were taking place in Rio and my clients were motivated by a desire to communicate on all levels.
So that brings us to Language as the art of communication. Of course, governments are motivated by economics - even if we put cynicism to one side, jobs are needed, hospitals have to be built and so on, but people as people have always wanted to engage, learn and be inspired through communication.
So, as educators why are we making it so difficult for them? I am actually an advocate of the IELTS programme. I think it is fit for purpose. Everything has its faults, but the aim of IELTS is to give universities and employers confidence that an applicant has the necessary pro-active and reactive skills to cope in an English-speaking environment. Nothing more, nothing less. So why do most International/High school curricula deem it necessary for students learning a foreign language to study high level literary devices for character analysis? Or describe a scene reminiscent of Wuthering Heights with high level emotional and sensory language? Of course, it is helpful in Grade 8 or 9 to show how to engage the audience in story-telling, but this level of English is normally at high level Mother tongue level or graduate level for a foreign language.
It seems to me that even if they write an exceptionally creative piece of work, they are marked down for grammar mistakes. How is this helpful?
Personally, I prefer to focus on teaching students how to express themselves at an appropriate level, making the differences clear between academic writing and how we communicate to friends, family, and those in authority.
Making ourselves understood with detail and accuracy is paramount, but we also need to be able to engage in conversation with an enquiring mind. I see the frustration in bright, younger students as they desperately try to find words to communicate their thoughts and ideas - and that is where the motivation lies. For most, it is not about the themes of comedy and tragedy in Shakespearean plays - this is real life, with 21st century demands and challenges.
We are, after all, preparing the young for their future as best we can.
So, my final point is just that. I am 55 and many teachers of my generation and older still use their own learning as a model for everything. There seems to be an unwritten rule that with experience comes wisdom, but I challenge this.
Even though I questioned the removal of grammar teaching earlier, on the other hand, I do strongly believe that language evolves and therefore to mark students down if they say ‘can’t’ instead of ‘can not’ for example, is in my view old fashioned and rigid.
Older generations lament the demise of language – at the moment with the political unrest in the UK and a divided nation over Brexit – a trend has evolved for EU remainers to insult EU leavers on social media as illiterate, stupid and uneducated due to grammar mistakes.
Marie Clair, of the ‘Plain English Campaign’ told the Daily Mail newspaper in 2018 that “Language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.”
For me, this implies that we used to be smarter in the past – and therefore must have been better? The majority of members in the Plain English campaign were born in the 1940s and 50s, yet it is in recent times that we have seen enormous growth in prosperity, efficiency and democracy?
There has to be a balance. It is hard to ignore that if you do not know or comply with structures of spelling and accuracy in Language learning you are not going to get very far.
Yet I am currently ‘translating’ key Shakespeare scenes for a future school performance. Language has evolved over the centuries and it will continue to do so. Interestingly, about 50 years before Shakespeare, writers of his day also seemed to feel that they were speaking a ‘degraded and faltering tongue’.
In the Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, the critic George Puttenham complained about how English was being altered negatively with new, foreign words, “strange terms of other languages … and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding”. The linguist Rudi Keller gives similar examples from Germany. “Hardly a week goes by in which some reader of the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ doesn’t write a letter to the editor expressing fear for the future of the German language.”
Nevertheless, I suspect that as we age, human beings have a natural tendency to believe ‘our day was best’ (or at the very least better) as I dismiss my predictive ‘c u l8er’ in favour of the obvious.
Personally, I believe that it is our job to prepare students and not control or influence them.
The world continues to get smaller and young people are moving about more and more, taking their innovative thinking with them. Social networks have exploded and they adapt to new technology with ease and astonishing speed. At school, on campus or in clubs, groups adopt new thinking, different ways of expressing themselves and a change in language is a direct result.
So, there we have the conundrum. There is a distinct difference between what is academically and socially acceptable. The ‘can’t’ instead of ‘cannot’ is deemed informal for academic language yet it’s OK to shorten language to ‘c u’ in a social environment. When I finished secondary school, it was forbidden to even use the word ‘OK’.
Do we change? Do we become more linguistically disorientated as we age? After all, the establishments which control our language standards such as universities, publishers and governments tend to be run by middle aged people from privileged backgrounds who judge our rhetoric. Could that be a reason why they find any evolution of dialogue threatening or even dangerous?
One day I think that everybody will speak English.
Until that happens, and language evolves with mechanisms and idioms which unite all cultures, I shall watch with interest as students adapt to an ever-changing world.
I hope that teaching practices adapt accordingly and appropriately, but continue to help young people take centre stage articulately and with confidence.
In time, I hope that what they say will be more important than how they say it.
