I would like some views about this growing problem for us MFL teachers, the fact that MFL are going optional in more and more schools tyhese days. I know that the decision was made 3 years ago, however, it is only now that we are starting to see the full extent of the decision.

I am very concerned at various level. The teacher in me is concerned about the fact that children are not going to be given the opportunity to have some sort of eexperience of a foreign culture and I think this is a problem very specific to Britain. I understand that Lnaguages for all wasn't the ideal solution either but hey do it in other countries (like France) and it doesn't seem to be such a problem there. The career woman in me thinks that this measure is catastrophic for job and career prospects. Many of us who have left or will leave their jobs will not be replaced and people like me who are trying to relocate, following my fiance's move are going to find themselves in very tricky situations. I hope that it doesnt get as bad as the education system in Germany whereby techers have to 'swao' jobs when they want to move schools.

has your school already gone 100% optional? wht are the consequences of such a decision? how have numbers been affected?

The government's policy on languages is an unmitigated disaster. We are only just beginning to see the knock-on effects that it will have. Languages in HE are already in a sorry state. Fewer and fewer students have been filtering through from the schools into HE for a number of years now. I write from personal experience as former director of the language centre at Thames Valley University (TVU) - or Ealing College as it used to be known. During the 1970s we were sending students to Brussels to sit the demanding exams for entry into the translating and interpreting professions - and many passed and enjoyed successful careers as professional linguists. But the supply of suitable students coming through from the schools dried up, and in the late 1990s the language departments at TVU were forced to close.

I can understand your point but I am still wondering why this has been happening. When I was a student (I did a degree in EFL in France) there were 500 of us in first year, half of the above who did not complete the degree, yet it is still a strong basis to run a very healthy faculty. I came to England as an assistant about 4 years ago and I thought the job was great as I was 'in charge' of 18 A-Level students. However, I rapidly grew aware that that year group was not like the others, in L6 there were 6 students and the numbers have been decreasing ever since. I am talking here about an independent school where children still have to do a language to GCSE. Now that in most state school children arre no longer expected to carry on with a language it makes things even more difficult for teachers to be able to teach their subjects at a high level.
When the measure was first annouunced I naively thought that we could get more pupils to choose Languages at GCSE by introducing it earlier in the curriculum, but I read in the TES a few Fridays ago that there is no sign this is going to happen, which is a real shame. There has been a debate in France for years about introducing languages early for many reasons especially physiological and I can't quite believe that what the British are doing is the exact opposite. What really breaks my heart is that most adults that I meet, when I tell them what I do for a living always say that if there was one subject they wish they'd done better in at school it would be languages.

A.B

The DfES claims that children (in England) will be "entitled" to learn a language from the age of seven (KS2) under it's new policy.

See the document entitled "Languages for all: languages for life - a strategy for England": http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languagesstrategy

See also the site of the National Advisory Centre on Early Language Learning:
http://www.nacell.org.uk

But "entitlement" is one thing and the reality is another. There is so far little evidence that there will be enough properly trained primary school teachers to put the government's policy into action.

Regarding the achievements of chidren at secondary school, fewer and fewer are reaching a useful level in MFL, i.e. that corresponding to the Common European Framework (CEF) Level B1 (Threshold), although the "Languages Ladder", an initiative recently introduced by the DfES, is (finally) making an attempt to relate our national qualifications to the CEF. See:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/DSP_languagesladder.cfm
Personally, I think they are a bit optimistic. I don't believe that Higher GCSE is equivalent to Level B1 - which requires around 350-400 learning hours to reach, assuming that learners are motivated and have a good learning environemt.

Have a look at my (deliberately provocative) article at:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/ictmfl.htm
"Information and Communications Technology and Modern Foreign Languages in the National Curriculum: some personal views"

English is often introduced to children from Class 1 (7 year-olds) in Sweden, and organised teaching (with textbooks, etc) usually starts in Class 3.

However, there's also a widely-held view amongst academic language didactics specialists that Swedish children here learn English despite the teaching they receive, rather than because of it. It's not difficult to see why we think this! School teaching is almost exclusively based on grammar-translation, and the version of grammatical metalanguage they use fell out of use in the English-speaking world in the 1950s (for very good reasons).

My explanation for why language teachers in Swedish schools make such beginners' errors is, well, because that's what many of them are - beginners! I'm working on a PGCE course at the moment, for example, and the poor bloody infantry of teacher trainees are going to receive precisely 6 hours of training in how to teach English - despite the fact that they're all going to be teachers of English at secondary schools.

I think that MFL teaching has a metaphorical mountain to climb in many countries in the world. We tend to put our most highly-qualified teachers to work on the pupils who need them least - the ones at the top. Then we entrust the vital task of teaching beginners to the teachers who have the least chance of success - people without even one term of study at higher level of the language they're supposed to teach, and who lack all but rudimentary training in language didactics.

Fortunately highly-qualified doesn't always mean good, and poorly-qualified often does actually mean good (thanks to skewed priorities in higher education in many university departments), but it's a strange way to run language teaching.

Thanks to David for his illuminating comments on the situation in primary school language teaching in Sweden. I didn't realise that the situation was similar to that in the UK at this level. Teaching young children a foreign language requires a high degree of specialised skills.

I can imagine why Swedish children learn English in spite of the teaching that they receive. Young Swedes, in common with young people in many parts of Europe, are constantly exposed to English. I have only visited Sweden four times, but it was obvious that English was all around you: pop culture, sport, slogans on teeshirts, etc. I have been to Norway, Denmark and Finland many times, and the situation is much the same. My brother used to work for Statoil in Norway. He never bothered to learn Norwegian as all business was conducted in English.

In the early 1980s I visited an upper secondary school (students aged 16+) in Norway and was invited by the English language teacher to take a conversation class with a group of about half a dozen students. Their English was impressive. I noticed that two of the students were wearing Manchester United football scarves. I asked them about this, and it turned out that they were keen followers of Man United. They also watched "Match of the Day" every Saturday, which was beamed out to Norway direct from the UK, with the commentary in English. Now there's motivation for you! (Norway follows UK football throughout the winter season - there's not a lot of football played in Norway during their severe winter.)

In the UK, however, we are constantly "protected" from foreign languages. Every time a French- or German-speaking politician appears in news broadcasts there is a voice-over that stifles the speaker's voice. COuldn't we have sub-titles instead, and then at least we might get some listening practice.

Thanks to both David and Graham for your interesting points fof view. I still can't quite get my head round the fact that language learning is poor in the UK. It can't just be linked to the fact that English is omnipresent in the world. There has to be more than that... How come students in Britain always have a lower level of MFL than their continental counterparts at the same age?
I remember being able to hold converstaions in English and German about topics such as politics, racism or pollution when I was 15. I couldn't imagine my top set in Yr 11 doing it. Now, I understand that the national Curriculum and the GCSE syllabus might have a large part to play in the matter. still! A mother asked me 2 years ago at Parents' evening when her son would be doing some French literature. I felt powerless... we don't do literature at KS4. We haven't got time and it won't get you an A... The lady in question is Dutch and I understand that in Holland, at least when she was at school, Literature was one of the various media used to teach languages. Although it may have its inconvenients, it teaches pupils how to use some tenses and certainly how to use the 3rd person...
It only just raises another question which is fundamental to our society. We hear that people don't read and that's because of the new modes of entertainment (TV, DVDs etc). Isn't the education system responsible as well if Literature is only accessible to the elite, the VERY VERY few who decide to carry on with Languages at A level?

On this note I'll have to sign off and I am eagerly awaiting your replies.

A.B.

I think our apparent weakness in learning foreign language boils down to two issues:

1. Lack of motivation.
2. Insufficent time allocation in the school curriculum - or badly organised time allocation, e.g. two double lessons per week.

I am also aware of an increasing reluctance among young people to read these days. Does this explain why students find languages hard? This article caught my attention recently:

"Online health advice for people with diabetes is often too complex to
understand, analysis suggests."
A scientist at Bath University looked at pages about diabetes on 15
internet health sites run mainly by charities and official bodies. He
found people would need a reading ability of an educated 11 to
17-year-old to understand the sites. However, he said the average
reading age of people in the UK was equivalent to an educated
nine-year-old."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3641634.stm

Poor reading ability seems to be a growing problem. Over the last two
years my business has received an increasing number of telephone calls
from ICT technicians in schools requesting technical advice on
installing software packages that we have sold them. My initial
reaction is to refer the technician to the technical section of the
manual that accompanies the software. When I do this there is often an
embarrassed silence at the other end of the telephone. There appears to
be not only a reluctance to read anything in print but also an inability
to read anything in print. It is clear from emails that I have received
from some ICT technicians that they cannot write correct English - maybe
they can't read it either.

Audrey asks:


It's not just the UK. Ireland fares only slightly better, even though Irish youngsters are exposed to two languages, English and Gaelic, from an early age, which should in theory raise their awareness of foreign languages in general and be a good preparation for learning French, German Spanish, etc. It has to be said, however, that only highly motivated students make good progress in Gaelic - unless they happen to live in one of the few remaining Gaelic speaking areas.

Americans and Canadians are no better than the Brits - probably a lot worse on the whole. Our family has relations in Canada, way out on one of the islands off the coast of British Columbia. All but one are resolutely monolingual, in spite of Canada's supposed bilingual policy, and they frequently complain about taxpayers' money being wasted on translating documents into French. The one exception on the Canadian side of our family happens to be a native French speaker from Ontario.

I visited Montreal a few years ago, and I always addressed waiters/waitresses and shop assistants in French, only to be told immediately how wonderful my French was - and then they switched to English. I was surprised to discover how many Anglos living in Montreal made little effort to master French.

A colleague of mine, a very experienced language teacher, argues that English is a bad starting point for learning other languages. English lacks, for example, gender in nouns (v. French and German), cases (v. German), agreement of adjectives (v. French and German), etc - i.e. too many new concepts. There is also the well-documented point that boys are "turned off" by French - they often perceive it as a "cissy" subject, and failure in French is regarded by many boys as an achievement! There have been several articles on this subject in the ALL Journal.

This is not unusual Graham - I have had the same thing happen to me when visiting european countries and trying to converse! It seems that everyone wants to practice their English when they enounter a native speaker and have little time for encouraging someone wanting to speak the language of the country they are visiting. My first real experience of this was when, at age 18, (many years ago!), I spent 6 weeks at a summer school in France for students from all over europe who were there to improve their French. I was able to use almost no French for the entire time I was there - students from England were used for English practice by tutors and students alike! It was very frustrating but they would not be thwarted!

In addition, there seems to be an amazing lack of ability by most non English speakers to comprehend the meanings of words from their own language not pronounced with the precisely correct accent. My father battled with this for many years as he tried to speak basic French, and to learn Danish (as he married a Dane) - he never was able to converse adequately in either language as his accent always confused native speakers even though his vocabulary and grammar were carefully learnt.

Regarding the lack of interest by English speaking school children in learning european languages - part of the problem is that they see little relevance in learning. When do they ever hear another language being spoken apart from at school? Any time that anyone appears on TV speaking in another language, it is very quickly translated by a helpful 'voice over'. This gives an impression that the language is not worth hearing and that English is much preferable! Films are rarely subtitled so that the language can be heard at the same time as reading subtitles - this is the way that many English or American films appear on european TV, so their youth are much more exposed to the English language. Similarly, most youth music is recorded in the English language so the singing of lyrics in acceptable and 'cool'. Imagine most English speaking students singing lyrics in French!?

I fear that the demise of learning foreign languages is not an easy issue to resolve.

When I visited Montreal two years ago using French got me very quickly through customs. I also had a nice conversation with our bus driver in French, only to discover that a. I do not speak French well and b. there are differences between 'European' French and Quebec French.

Marco writes:


Yes, SUBSTANTIAL differences. The local dialect is known as "joual", which is how "cheval" (horse) is pronounced in the Québec dialect. My French-speaking relative in Canada is perfectly intelligible to me (she has an educated accent) but I am always fascinated by the way she pronounces the nasal sounds "-en", "-in", "-on", etc.

As in Sweden, here in Spain, exposure to English throughout many years of education certainly doesn't guarantee anyone learns it! Students have to take English right up to the age of 18, and it's even a compulsory subjects in the university access exam. However, you rarely meet English-speaking youngsters who didn't learn their English at some sort of private language school... They all seem to have a far greater command of the rules of English grammar than I do, but they can't communicate. This is a reflection of the backwardness of many aspects of the Spanish educational system. It's come a long way in the last 25 years, but there's still a very long way to go...

Many eons ago, when I was a teacher of English and French in Dartford, I went on an in-service training course run by the ILEA (what a crime it was to abolish that body!). One of the presentations was from a school in North London who'd achieved great results in French like this:

In the 1-3 years (of secondary school - as was) they exchanged their hours of French with their colleagues in other subjects. Each pupil got 1 hour/week in which they learned a different language up to a certain level of proficiency each term. At the end of the term the pupil received a certificate saying, for example, "I can buy an ice-cream in Moscow" or "I can read the headlines in the Rome newspaper".

Then in years 4-5, the French teachers would get two whole afternoons per week, and I realise now that what they did was the kind of communicative language teaching I've become familiar with from English over the years.

The years 1-3 activities primed the pupils to realise that a) there are different languages in the world, and you don't have to know everything to know something.

Over the years I've taught people English in all sorts of contexts and cultures, and I don't really buy the idea that there are easy and more difficult languages - it all depends where you're coming from. There aren't even easy and more difficult structures. You might think that "what would the witch have done if the dwarfs had been at home when she called" is complicated, but the Swedish equivalent is almost a word-for-word transliteration (vad skulle häxan ha gjort om dvärgarna hade varit hemma när hon ringde).

If I were having to teach, say, Swedish in the UK (why not?), motivation would be the first thing I'd have to tackle (Swedish footballers could be a good way in - get both the boys and the girls!), but I'd also have to make sure that I didn't make the language unnecessarily impenetrable by filling the pupils' heads with useless grammatical metalanguage that even Swedes don't understand (they call their noun 'genders' utrum och neutrum, which I've never heard a comprehensible explanation for!).

David writes:


See The Language Investigator website. This site is aimed mainly at primary school teachers who are interested introducing a multilingual dimension into their lessons, but the materials are relevant to teachers and pupils in secondary education too. The work is a result of a one-year project called "Thinking through Languages" which was developed within a group of Coventry primary schools. The project was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. An excellent site for raising awareness about languages, with lots of useful links: http://www.language-investigator.co.uk

There was a lot of this kind of stuff going on in connection with the European Day of Languages, 26 September. See the European Centre for Modern Languages site: http://www.ecml.at/edl


David writes:


Exactly - "it all depends where you are coming from". Indo-European languages are broadly similar, and even if you move from one sub-group (e.g. Romance) to another (e.g. Germanic) you often find a lot of similarities in lexis and grammar, and once you've learned one language in the sub-group you have a good starting point for learning others in the same sub-group, e.g. my first foreign language is German but I can make a lot of sense of written Dutch (not spoken Dutch, however). I had to learn Hungarian a few years ago. Now that's a challenge if your previous experience is only within the Indo-European family! The lexis is totally different, and there are aspects of Hungarian syntax and morphology that you won't find anywhere in other Western European languages, e.g. "Bécsbe a feleségemmel mentem" = "I went to Vienna with my wife". The sentence parses thus:
"Bécs" = "Vienna", with suffix "be" meaning "to".
"a" = "the".
"feleség" = "wife", with an infix "em" meaning "my" and a suffix "mel" meaning "with".
"mentem" = "I went", the "t" indicating past tense and the "em indicating first person singular. The normal position for the verb is at the end of the sentence.

Firstly with reference to your comments about Montreal, well don't be surprised to find English speakers there as there is a huge English community! There is an English Language medium univeristy, English language schools and the English culture florishes. If you want to speak French in Canada you need to go to Quebec City or somewhere truely purely Francophone, which Montreal isn't.

Here in New Brunswick there is an interesting mix of Francophone and Anglophone and Moncton, my nearest town, is technically entirely bilingual. Very handy when shopping as all the food labels are both in French and English allowing you to pick up masses of vocab very quickly! However, you will find many Anglophones who cannot understand a word of French and yet all the Francophones speak or at least understand English. I found the same phenomenon in Rwanda which is also technically a bilingual country (in terms of European languages of course!).

The question is 'why is that?'. Is it a case of English being more useful, more easy to pick up the basics of, more heard? We have radio and TV both in French an English and French Acadian music is very popular....So is it something more political?

The French speaking people here are known as 'Acadians' who are a group of French people who moved to Canada but who refused to allign themselves either with the British or French Monarchies. They then found themselves persecuted, discriminated against and eventually deported (to Louisiana amongst other places - hence the term Cajun). They effectively have no 'homeland' as they are spread throughout Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, and so the only ties that really bind them together are cultural - their French Language, their music and Catholicism.

Bearing this in mind, why do they all speak English? maybe because had they not learnt it they would never have got jobs - in the way that most black South Africans had to learn Africaans to get anywhere in life.

And if you want to hear French spoken with a 'different' accent then New Brunswick is the place! Most French speakers sound like they come from Cornwall! and a typical greeting sounds like ' Sor- vo.....or?'!

My husband is a native French speaker and yet on Honeymoon in Nice the locals found my terrible french easier to understand than his, though they did keep complimenting 'the american' on how well he spoke French;-)

And finally, on the issue of pronounciation, people here don't know what I'm talking about when I pronounce Tomato the english way! Now, come on, if I can understand Tomato with an American accent surely they can figure out Tomato with an english one...but apparently not! This is even more bizarre considering that the french for Tomato has almost the same pronounciation as the english.....the tomato sauce thickens!

Rowena

p.s. depending on whether the station is French or English here interviews in other languages are overdubbed but you can still hear the original in the background. Now, I can cope with this seeing as my French is so basic that i can shut it out, but what if you are truely bilingual. Surely it drives you crazy having two conversations going on at the same time!?!

Oh yes and getting back to the point;-)

When I was teaching a bottom set in the UK it was pointed out to me that thee kids would be so much better off when they didn't have to study French any more as they were struggling enough with English. I was inclined to agree. Supporting that arguement is that here in New Brunswick whilst the majority of the people are bilingual very few of them can speak both well and hardly any can write both. If anything people feel that coping with two languages means losing the ability to speak and write one language well..... Incidentally apparently New Brunswick has the lowest literacy rate in Canada.

They have French and English immersion here both in Primary and Seconday school which I think is a wonderful scheme as the language teaching does not take away time from their other studies. However, you have to be in the top part of the year to participate so the lower ability students are affectively stigmatised by not getting into immersion. Also, its expensive to run and its so difficult to find French Immersion teachers that I imagine that they aren't all perfect.

I have met a number of Anglophone students who went through the system and still can't speak or write French, but I'm sure they understand more than if they had not participated at all.

The New Brunswick system may not be prefect but I favour it over that of the UK. Starting to learn languages at an age when you are most insecure is just foolish. Languages are so stressful because you have to speak and can't hide in your books. Accents are foreign and threatening and sound downright foolish coming from the lips of a Brit. No wonder UK teenagers hate French and German.....but I doubt that they would feel the same way if they got over that hurdle earlier in life.

For as long as I don't speak French here I feel very ignorant. New Brunswickers may not speak French and English perfactly but at least they can communicate which is more than I can do! And listening to them slipping effortlessly between English and French just makes me sick with jealousy.

Rowena

Rowena writes:


I rarely have a problem with North American English, but our relatives in Canada often fail to understand some British words I use - usually swear words such as "b*ll*cks". I find I start to drift into North American while I am in Canada, especially when talking about cars, and I'll use words such as "gas", "windshield", "fender", "trunk", etc in order to avoid having to repeat myself or translate!

I have a friend in Montreal, an ex-pat Brit whom I have known since my schooldays. He runs a small business in downtown Montreal. He speaks pretty good French, and he claims that this gives him an advantage in business, as French-speaking customers appreciate dealing with him in their own language.

Having been in Canada for over a year now I find that I am trying to speak three languages - British English, Canadian French and Canadian English which is quite different to American English. For example, Canadians spell English pretty much the same way we do - Programme, Centre etc etc however there are so many American words entering the Canadian language that I have to keep correnting myself according to who I am speaking to

To a friends here
"So, you like my pants, I bought them in the mall. Yeah, there were ten bucks off. Sure, I'll show you where. We can stop for a coffee"

To a friend from England
"So you like my trousers, I bought them in the shopping arcade. There was a ten dollar discount. Of course I'll show you where. We can stop and have a nice cup of tea"

;-)

Needless to say i usually come out with a total jumble of trunks/boots, gas/petrol, sneakers/trainers, cookies/biscuits (another almost french word they dont understand!) and no-one has a clue what i'm talking about!

I think Graham has made the crucial point here. French speakers are grateful when people speak french to them. English speaking people expect others to speak English

Rowena

>When I was teaching a bottom set in the UK it was pointed out to me that thee kids would be so much better off when they didn't have to study French any more as they were struggling enough with English. I was inclined to agree.<

I don't. There is so much good practice worldwide when it comes to teaching modern foreign languages to those with special educational needs. If you look at my bibliography at

http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/mfl/biblio.doc

you will find over 1200 references reporting this good practice. Indeed, some dyslexic learners perform better in a foreign language such as German or Spanish than they do in English with its opaque spelling system.

Bilingualism isn't a liability. It's an asset in a world which is predominantly multilingual and multicultural.

OK, I'm not pretending to be an expert on languages, and maybe some students may well find French or German easier than English. I'm just glad I'm not the person who has to persuade them to try:-)

I agree that being monolingual these days is a total disaster and envy all the bilingual people here. That said my husband is an Engineer, bilingual and generally very bright and yet he consistently flunked all of his French and English classes at university and makes mistakes constantly in both languages. I do sometimes wonder if it might be nice for him to feel confident in one language rather than shakey at two.

A Ugandan colleague of mine could speak 5 languages but felt that he could not confidently make a speach in any one of them.

Maybe I'm clutching at straws to make myself feel better ;-) but has any research been done regarding whether constantly using two languges means that you use a very simple, limited vocabulary in both rather than enriching just one. Or is it just engineers:-)

Also a good friend of mine who is fluent in French only learnt the language properly later in life when she moved to France. When she spends time in France she says that she 'loses' her English and vice versa. Is this a phenomenan limited just to people who learn languages or can it affect people who grow up speaking both but then spend time in a monolingual region?

Rowena

Rowena writes:


I cannot point immediately to research results, but there are many bilingual people whom I have met who function perfectly well in both languages with a full vocabulary in both languages. Conference interpreters have often had a bilingual upbringing and they have to be equally competent in both languages.

Rowena writes:


I've only experienced "loss of English" once, when I returned from a six-month period as a student in Germany. On my return to England I found myself hunting for English words on occasions, but it didn't last long. Bilingual people are so used to "code switching" that they are sometimes unaware of which language they are using. A German friend of mine was trying to hold a conversation in German with my wife, who does not speak German. I had to intervene and point out to my friend that she was speaking German! I speak fluent German myself, and I have found myself recalling conversations I have had with bilingual friends, but I could not remember in which language they took place even though I could clearly remember the topics of the conversations.

A psycholinguist can probably shed more light on these fascinating phenomena.

The local university here offers a degree course in Translation. Bearing in mind that half the province is bilingual and grew up speaking both French and English you would think that most people would be capable of translating but very few actually manage to get onto the course.

Perhaps the translators for conferences came from a certain, more educated background, as well as being brought up bilingual. Here, where it is effectively the norm, I can't imagine our bilingual roofer translating at a conference!

I think New Brunswick is an interesting example because people from all walks of life are bilingual and not just those from families who took the time and care to make sure their children spoke more than one language.

On a different note, to get a job with the Canadian Government i.e. well paid, you must be fluently bilingual in French and English. This has caused some contraversy because perfectly capable people are turned don't because their French or English is not quite up to scratch. Our current Prime Minister is an Anglophone who, to me speaks great French, whereas the previous one, Jean Cretien was a bilingual Francophone but blundered his way through many speaches in English and became the butt of a multitude of jokes as a result. I doubt the same jokes were made about him by French speakers. Perhaps the current Prime Minister, Paul Martin, is mocked by the population of Quebec.

I find it interesting that intelligence is so often preceived via a persons ability to express themselves clearly to the extent that our ex PM was considered by many a Buffoon even though to have got where he was he can't have been.

Whilst working in Rwanda I stated that my students inability to pass exams had nothing to do with their intellegence and everything to do with the fact that they couldn't speak, read or write english! My programme director replied that they can't be very bright if they can't speak the language they are supposed to be studying in. A statement I found disturbing.

In the near future I am going to be tutoring kids who have recently arrived in Canada as refugees or the children of economic immigrants. They are decribed by the school boards as being 16 but having the ability of an 11 year old. I would rephrase that to say 'perceived abiliy'.

Rowena

Just anecdote: I left England for foreign parts 30 years ago because of the foreign languages provision at the school at which I was teaching at the time. I was teaching history and French at a comprehensive school in Hampshire. The school was strictly streamed -- 2A1 was the top stream, followed by 2A2, 2A3, 2B1, 2B2, and 2B3 (the "special ed" class). I'd been teaching 2B1 French for the whole year. We'd worked hard, the kids and I, and they'd really made progress and had begun to develop some quite good communication skills. I was quite proud, and, as we all know, pride comes before a fall!

At the beginning of June, we had a staff meeting to discuss the timetable for the following year. I looked at it and raised my hand to ask a question:

"Excuse me, Headmaster, but there appears to be a mistake. I can't find the French class for 3B1."

"No, that's right. They're going to do Gardening instead."

"Oh, you mean that they'll choose between French and Gardening?"

"No, that's a B stream. They don't have the intellectual capacity to learn a foreign language. They will do Gardening instead."

"But if they don't have the intellectual capacity to learn a foreign language on 3rd Year, what have I been doing teaching them French all this year?"

"Mr Tribe, you obviously don't understand the Comprehensive Idea."

"Well, clearly not, Headmaster. Perhaps you could explain."

"It's all about equality of educational opportunity. We gave them the opportunity to learn FRench for two years. Now they're going to do Gardening. If they want to learn more French, they can go to the Technical College after they finish here."

I went home that night, took out my trusty TES and applied for 36 jobs. The first firm offer I got was from an international school in Tehran, and I've been overseas ever since...

I trust things have improved since I left...

Rowena writes:


I have worked as a professional translator (German-English) and I continue to take an interest in translation, especially in the ICT tools that are now available to translators, e.g. “Translation Memory” ™ tools that remember documents that you have translated before and that can patch in whole chunks of translated text where the archived source text matches the source text of the document you are currently working on. It’s a great system for producing updates of technical manuals and for official documents where there’s a lot of repeated standardised language. The EU uses a version of the TRADOS TM tool. It can save up to 80% of a translator’s time. You can read about this kind of stuff at the ICT4LT site in Section 3 of Module 3.5, Human Language Technologies: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_3-5.htm

Mike writes:


No, it’s probably a lot worse now that no pupil HAS to study a language beyond the age of 14.

Another anecdote: When my daughters were at school I had a running battle (I was a parent governor) with the headteacher over timetabling. One example: My elder daughter wanted to do Electronics, which was timetabled against Typing (that takes you back a few years!) which was taught at the local tech college. When I queried this, it was clear that the headteacher perceived Electronics as a boys’ subject and Typing as a girls’ subject. My daughter chose Electronics, and I bought her a keyboard skills program that ran on our ancient Commodore computer – which brought her typing skills up to scratch (and mine too). My daughter was the only girl in two 25-pupils set studying Electronics. She got a good CSE pass and found later on that what she had learned was highly relevant to her current occupation, namely running an electronic-based graphic design business.

Sorry, wrong URL! The ICT4LT URL is:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-5.htm
I should have checked this first.

Sorry about the long absence... I have been busy at work trying to understand how I was going to be able to justify my post next year. The new idea is to teach Languages together with a more practical and /or more popular subject such as IT, Leisure and Tourism or Business Studies. I feel cheated.
The other option would be to teach other subjects as non specialists. I know that it happens more often than we think, however, I would feel really bad teaching anything else than what I have been trained for because the techniques, although similar are different. I don't think I'd be doing any kid any favour by teaching something badly.

Chin up, it's nearly Friday!

Sorry about the long absence... I have been busy at work trying to understand how I was going to be able to justify my post next year. The new idea is to teach Languages together with a more practical and /or more popular subject such as IT, Leisure and Tourism or Business Studies. I feel cheated.
The other option would be to teach other subjects as non specialists. I know that it happens more often than we think, however, I would feel really bad teaching anything else than what I have been trained for because the techniques, although similar are different. I don't think I'd be doing any kid any favour by teaching something badly.

Chin up, it's nearly Friday!

The effect of the government's policy is just what modern languages teachers predicted. Have a look at this depressing article in The Guardian Online (5 Oct 2004)

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...1319291,00.html

The points that struck me most were:

1. The sharp dip in the number of pupils taking a GCSE in languages.

2. The contradictory statements made by Stephe Twigg, MP.

3. The hypocrisy embodied in the word "entitlement". "Entitlement" is now a worsened word in my eyes.

4. The clear evidence that it is more difficult to get a good grade in modern foreign languages than in most other subjects, which leads headmasters into enouraging subjects other than modern languages in order to improve their performance tables stats.

Stephen Fawkes of ALL sums it up:
"Only last week, Denis MacShane, the minister for Europe, was talking up the value of modern languages, while the DfES is effectively sidelining them. It's hard to see the government putting its hands up and admitting it got it wrong, because that's not what governments do."

On the positive side, it appears from the article that The Guardian's reporters read or get to know about messages in the Lingu@NET Forum. As the article puts it:
"After the publication of the AQA GCSE results this summer, an online modern languages forum for teachers went white-hot. ' Has anyone out there had a disaster today with their GCSE results cos we have?' was one posting."
You can read all about in it the Lingu@NET Forum archives:
http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum/

I would like to see this forum go white-hot in a similar way. Someone in government circles might actually listen to us if we create enough noise!

One of the things I really took exception to in the Guardian article Graham referred to was the implication that all that was needed to get more pupils to study MFL was more encouragement from teachers and parents. That's a very easy way of evading responsibility in my view.

In my experience it is the 'structural factors' which play the most important role in education. If, for example, a pass at GCSE in a modern foreign language was a requirement for a university place (as, I understand, are passes in Maths and English), then the numbers of GCSE entrants would shoot up overnight.

This doesn't absolve teachers of all responsibility, of course. In Sweden the previous government came up with this great reform of sixth-form colleges, one of whose effects was to make the average grade for all subjects the deciding factor in gaining a place at university. Since grades in French and German were generally lower, this resulted in a dramatic decline in the numbers of sixth formers studying French and German … which fed through to the universities, resulting in a dramatic decline of MFL students … which led to closures … which led to a virtual disappearance of teacher trainees wanting to be teachers of MFL …

However, at the same time, much of the teaching of German in particular was stuck fast in the driest and least effective grammar-translation methodology (lists of prepositions that take the Accusative case, and all that rubbish). I've often had to gently enquire of university teachers of German who it was that trained all these teachers in schools who fail to enthuse their pupils and deliver first-year students of such poor quality to the long-suffering academics (yes, it was those same long-suffering academics!).

So, to me it looks as if there's a double-whammy here: if your teaching in MFL is way below standard, then the minute the teaching environment becomes hostile, MFL dies off suddenly and dramatically, in much the same way that someone suffering from starvation will be killed off by a cold virus that an otherwise healthy person would hardly notice.

Excellent point. And, of course, it applies to almost all areas of education, not just MFL!

David writes:


A pass in a modern foreign language used to be compulsory for entrance to university, regardless of the subject the applicant intended to study. To enter London University (where I studied from 1961 to 1968) you had to have an O Level in Maths, English and a Foreign Language – plus three other O Levels and two A Levels.

We still encourage our youngsters to take a language as we seem to be aware that top universities will prefer a candidate with a language to a candidate with similar aptitudes without a language.

I also heard through the staffroom grapevine that ultimately the education system was moving towards a Baccalaureat-type system, which could be pretty good news for Languages if it is anything like the real thing. However, I am not exactely sure how younsters (and teachers) would perceive the fact that they have to take 10 subjects to the final exam... Another good debate between those in favour of study in bredth and those in favour of study in depth. As for teachers it puts back in the frame the big problem of teaching pupils who are very disinterested. We already know how difficult it is to teach demotivated pupils aged 14-16 but what about those 16 and over? That would be a whole new kettle of fish!!

> a Baccalaureat-type system<

England and Wales have always adopted a different line from other European countries when it came to the organisation of upper secondary education. Some argue that the three A-level curriculum is the "gold standard", marking out the UK as a centre of academic excellence. Others would counter with the argument that this provision is simply "higher education on the cheap", allowing UK universities to run 3-year degree courses while continental ones took 4 years to reach a comparable standard.

I certainly enjoyed specialisation at 14+ at my 1960s grammar school - we had arts and science sides, and I ended up taking just 6 O-levels, four of them languages - English, French, German and Latin. However, when I became a teacher, I realised how narrow such a curriculum was. You can see the same thing happening when some teenage "genius" goes up to Oxford to study Maths or Science, emotionally immature and contemptuous of any academic discipline other than the one or two they have elected to study. The newspapers used to celebrate the achievements of these precocious individuals, who gained, say, an "A" in A-level maths at the age of 12. I always wrote in to the paper asking why they didn't report how the same student was getting on with English, Science, History, Geography, MFL etc. The silence thereafter was deafening!

I strongly believe that secondary education is about breadth, not depth. Breadth of learning is essential these days when it's extremely unlikely that people will be doing the same job all their lives. There's plenty of opportunity for specialisation at tertiary level, and if that means universities getting an extra year to compensate, so be it. I began as a linguist teaching French and German up to A-level and now I'm a special educational needs teacher, wondering why I didn't make the switch to SEN years ago.

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

I agree with David!


Interestingly, we have a very similar background. I went to a highly selective boys' grammar school (1953-1961), passed O-levels in English, French, German, Latin, Maths, History and General Studies (1958) and A-levels in French, German and Latin (1960). I studied German (major) with French (minor) at Queen Mary College, London (1961-64), did a PGCE course at Goldsmiths' College (1964-65), read for a PhD at Queen Mary College, London (1965-68), while doing a bit of part-time teaching in secondary schools in London. I taught full-time in secondary education from 1968 to 1971 - and this is when I realised how narrow my educational background was. I moved into higher education in 1971, where I taught German at degree level.

My interest in ICT dates from 1976. Who could believe that I would have switched from my PhD research topic (A Lexicon of Terms used in Medieval German Heraldry and the Tournament) to ICT?! There is a link, however. Once I had gathered all the data for my PhD I needed to organise it. I approached the computer services department to see if they could help - and they did.

I've taught the International Baccalaureate for some years. I don't unerstand the reference to 10 subjects. Our students take six subjects, one each from: maths, science, native language, foreign language, and "man and society", and one more which can either be a fine arts subject, or another choice from the previous list. Three subjects are taken at standard level and three at higher level.

This seems to work well. The spread of six subjects guarantees the breadth, while the three higher level subject are studied in considerable depth. The compulsory "Theory of Knowledge" class attempts to tie together the learning across the six subjects.

As far as the number of exams is concerned, there would appear to be fewer than under the present English system in which, over a period of three years, students may take 10+ GCSEs, 5+ ASs and 3 or 4 A2s!

>Interestingly, we have a very similar background.<

Indeed we do, Graham! I attended what was then a direct-grant boys' grammar school with its own entrance exam which I sat at the age of 7 in 1954. To my 4 O-level languages, I added Maths and Chemistry, proceeding to A-levels in French, German and English Literature in 1965 and 1966. Then I did a joint honours Modern Languages BA at the University of Leeds before heading back north to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne for my PGCE. I did my long teaching practice at the school where I still teach in South Shields. I began my career teaching French and German to A-level and switched to learning support during the 1990s, when I qualified in special educational needs via an Open University Advanced Diploma.

I've always enjoyed studying, so when I began teaching I enrolled on a part-time MA by exam and dissertation in "20th century German Life and Letters" during which I finally got to grips with history, a subject I hadn't even taken to O-level when I was in secondary education.

I then did a part-time M.Ed by thesis on the teaching of English and French in East German schools. It was fascinating finding out how language teaching could be overlayered with party politics to reinforce the ruling ideology in the GDR. I did a tour of East Germany in the mid-1970s, which was then a relatively unusual destination for westerners. I enjoyed the research so much that I took ten years to complete my thesis, which ended up very long indeed. There's an ICT connection here. My deadline for submitting the thesis was the end of the Easter holidays 1983. Just before the holidays I found out that the margins of my manuscript were too narrow for the binder. So I spent two weeks typing the thesis again on my old typewriter, with my fingertips slowly reducing to bloody ribbons as I hammered away morning, noon and night. Thank goodness my father offered to do the photocopying, otherwise I would never have completed the job. Everything worked out in the end, although my fingers took a while to heal.

And then what happened in 1983? The BBC micro came on to the scene and I purchased a 32K version for £300 and installed a WORDWISE chip inside to provide myself with a word-processing facility. I could have spared myself all the grief and pain involved in retyping my thesis if that machine had arrived a few months earlier! Still, technology, and more importantly its associated pedagogy, has given me a lot of pleasure over the years and the opportunity to attend educational conferences in interesting places (Hungary, Canada, Japan among others) with fellow teacher-enthusiasts, first as a listener and then as a presenter.

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

David writes:


What a coincidence! I spent a month at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig in 1976, attending a refresher course for teachers of German. I lodged (unusually for that time) with a family. It was an unusual destination for Brits in those days - I've written a little bit about it in another section of this Forum.

David writes:


I bought a 32K BBC micro in 1983 and installed a WORDWISE chip too! The BBC micro still works and is packed away in my attic. I bought a Commodore PET around two years earlier, and managed to pick up a good word-processing package from a computer fair. I wrote the first CILT guide on computers in language learning with the Commodore package in 1982. The computer studies dept at Ealing College introduced me to word-processing in 1977, which is when I began to use the college computer to organise my research thesis.

And we met at the University of Victoria, Canada, at the FLEAT III conference 1997, didn't we? We get over to Victoria regularly (home of the Hot Potatoes team, Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes). We have relations on one of the nearby Gulf Islands.

Small world!

I realise that David and I may be taking this thread a little bit off track, reminiscing in this way, but our experiences show that bridging disciplines is a very fruitful experience.

I used to teach German in the context of ICT at Ealing College. It was one of the special options that students could begin in their second year. They were taught about ICT in German and in English, read texts about ICT in both languages, and had to produce: a project dealing with an aspect of ICT in a German speaking country - which they researched during their year abroad - and a translation into English of a demanding German technical text of around 1500 words. It was a popular option and was highly relevant to the careers that some of the students eventually took up.

In order to revive languages at KS4 maybe we have to think of ways in making languages appear more relevant or interesting, especially to boys, who often regard languages as "cissy" (which is well-documented in numerous articles). French is often considered a "girls' subject" by boys.

There's a debate going on right now in the Linguanet Forum on teaching languages in the context of sport - which makes pretty good sense these days when you consider the international dimension of sports such as football. I've cited the case of a school in the North of England inviting French footballers from Bolton Wanderers to the school to talk to the children in French. How about French for football fans?

Making the language more relevant is probably the key - and it's amazing how difficult many teachers/textbooks find this.

To give one concrete example …

I was visiting a local secondary school last week with an Erasmus scholar, and the lesson we had to watch was about the passive. A very enthusiastic teacher, who had great rapport with the class, took a group of 16 year-olds through a pre-Chomskyian grammar-translation exercise based around a twee drawing of a mouse being caught by a Heath Robinson contraption ("the mouse is lifted up by the crane").

One of the exercises I use starts with 'passive cards' where each part of speech is printed in a different colour. The students first have to just make sentences (without using the same colour twice). Then they have to turn the cards over … and they discover the subject becoming the agent and moving to the end of the sentence when they read the counterparts on the backs of the cards. (E.g. "Edison invented the lightbulb/The lightbulb was invented by Edison").

Then they go on to an exercise where they work at a workshop that was burgled last night. They have to turn their friend's spoken sentences ("They broke down the door and opened the safe") into what they would write on the insurance claim form (The door was broken down and the safe was opened).

Now, I don't claim that this is a fantastic way of doing it, but at least there's a storyline behind it that more grown-up students can relate to. There's also a point in doing the exercise.

We language teachers often get all excited about features of language which aren't actually very interesting or relevant. Gender is one of these areas, in my opinion. Apart from demonstrating that you're a foreigner, what's the problem with saying 'le femme' instead of 'la femme'? Sooner or later you have to get it right, of course, but it surely isn't one of the areas that beginners should be spending such a lot of time on.

To give you an English example, what's the difference between the verbs in the following sentences?

a. He took his clock-in card from the rack.
b. He took a look at the clock.

Did you notice that sentence b contains a delexical verb? And so what if it does? I don't think I've ever had a learner who's even noticed that until I've pointed it out.

David writes:


I'm inclined to agree. There are a few instances in German where a difference in gender changes the meaning, e.g. "die See" ("sea"), "der See" ("lake"), but the context usually makes clear what is meant. Most Germans wouldn't bat an eyelid if you were in a restaurant and ordered "ein Kaffee" (which could be a gender mistake or a case mistake) instead of "einen Kaffee" (masculine gender, accusative case). You would still get a cup of coffee.

I've always argued that knowing vocab and pronouncing it correctly is more important for the purposes of communication. Without vocab you are lost, and even then there is a wide degree of tolerance. If you are in Africa and someone suddenly shouts "Big cat, him come!" I think you would get the message that a lion is on the loose.

One of the exercises I get Swedish teacher trainees to do is to put this list up on the board:

Pronunciation
Grammar
Vocabulary

and then ask them to rank them according to:

1. How difficult are they for learners?
2. How important are they for learners?
3. How difficult are they to teach?
4. How important are they to teach?
5. How important are they to academics, text-book writers and drafters of national curricula?

The results always put pronunciation last (of course), as being both difficult to teach and less important than grammar or vocabulary. In fact, most teacher trainees (who are amateur language teachers by definition) think that what they'll be doing as language teachers is teaching grammar.

Then I ask them to think about foreigners like me speaking Swedish, and to try to identify what it is about our Swedish which makes it difficult to understand. The answer, of course, is our pronunciation.

My conclusion from this highly-unscientific survey is that one of the most important developments which needs to take place if more pupils are to become interested in foreign languages is for language teachers to change their attitude to what a language really is, and how people learn them.

I was talking about the French Baccalaureat and I did have to take 10 subjects even if I was already specialising. Indeed, as well as studying most of the 'common' subjects I had to decide aged 16 whether I wanted to go on the 'Science@ Bac, the 'Litearure' one or the 'economics' one. This was lalready a specialisation as most of my time table was dedicated to literary subjects (French, 2 languages, History and Geography and phylosophy), on top of that I had to do physics and Biology, Maths, PE, and 2 options (Extra English and Ancient Greek): total 10!! I feel priviledged in the sense that I did get a very wide range of skills in all the subjects as well as some very specialised skills in my dominant subjects.

I apologise if I hadn't made my point very clear before hand. I just assumed that if it had the same name it was the same thing. Indeed, some schools in my home town offer the German Abitur and pupils are tought the French curriculum through the medium of German but eventually sit a German-style exam and receive a certificate which is recognised by both educational systems. This is something that woukd scare a lot of people off, however I think that the rationale behind it is excellent. Rather than see Languages as an end, it is merely a medium a tool to be used to achieve something else. To support this argument, I can only say that very few of us learn a language for the sake of it, instead they learn a language in order to be able to access skills/knowledge/etc that they would not be able to should they try to do it with their own language. Interestingly enough, in the Textbooks Avantage 2 (Heinemann) and to a lesser extent Auf Deutsch 2, there are interesting chapters dedicated to 'other subjects'. I really like those chapters because they prove the point that you can do allsorts in a language, it's on;ly there as a means of communication. Unfortunately I always break my teeth on them because they require some background knowledge that pupils don't have (especially for the History and geography parts). After all, isn't it what universities do on their language courses? Teach about the language or the culture related to the countries where the language is spoken, in the loanguage. It makes it so much more to the point.

A.B.

I rate pronunication and listening skills highly.

Our local Chinese take-away is great. The people who run it are charming, and I have no problem communicating with them face-to-face. But when we phone through an order, they often fail to understand us, and we can't make sense of their replies. This has resulted in us getting some interesting combinations of dishes - but I'm all in favour of being adventurous!

Teaching pronunciation and listening skills is quite labour-intensive, isn't it? I think ICT can help here - but in the end pronunciation is best judged by a human being. We have quite a high degree of tolerance, e.g. most English MT speakers are not put off by foreigners getting the "th" sound wrong, pronouncing it as "z". It's not really a crucial sound, I guess: Cockneys say "Forty fousand feavers on a frush's froat", and many Irish pronounce "th" as "t" or "d". But the "l" sound is often crucial. A Japanese colleague used to talk about a "General Erection", which is not what he meant - or maybe he did!

I think the best thing you have to bear in mind is communication, understanding what you are told and getting yourself understood.
I was told on a course at University that teachers shouldn't encourage perfection but communication. I agree to some extent. the lecturer said that when you go to a foreign country all you need to be able to do is
1. find food and drink
2. find shelter
3. find your way (understand to go to legal places, it was in the context of immigration and assimilation).

I thought this was such a good argument but unfortunately, we can't quite stick to it. you have to be able to master reasonably all the skills required by the language in question: vocab, grammar and pronunciation.

I agree that understanding people with strong foreign accents can be quite difficult for me, as a foreigner. For example, I had to complain about a bill (as I had to recently) to someone in a call centre. The person I was talking to had a strong Asian accent, which I generally find difficult, and he in turn found it difficult to understand me. Conclusion, I never managed to get to the bottom of the problem and probably got ripped off by the company he worked for. Somewhat less amusing than the odd Chinese dish...


I find that a lot of effort is put on listening skills in schools in Britain, and results in the exams are genertally good, higher than speaking or writing. Or maybe is it just my school and the fact that we are 2 Natives in the Department. To me it is the most difficult because there is only the sound to help you and once it's gone, it's gone... going back to phone conversation, I find it the worst. It feels tlike being in the exam room and to top it all, asking people to repeat every thing they say twice or three times can be irritating for the one and frustrating to the other...

Audrey writes:


Aaargh! Don't tell me about it! Large organisations in their efforts to save money are locating their call centres overseas, but they have totally failed to realise how important it is for their staff to speak good, unaccented (or slightly accented) English. I was relayed to a call centre in Jamaica recently - at least I think it was Jamaica. I love the West Indian variety of English, but in this case I simply could not understand the guy at the other end of the phone. Several hardware and software companies have call centres in Ireland, but no problem here; Irish English has a pleasant ring, and the staff are usually courteous and often display a sense of humour too.

On moving to Rwanda and chosing to learn the local language of Kinyarwanda (a Bantu language with some similarities to Swahili) I felt that vocabulary and pronounciation would be the two most important things to work on considering that for a while a least i was planning on simply pointing at things, naming them and saying a number.

Sadly this does not work in languages with 15 different 'genders' and which take the plural at the start rather than the end of the word. For example

umuhungo - the singular of boy
abahungo - boys

The numbering system then changes depending on the 'gender' so

umuhungo umwe = one boy
abahungo abirir/atatu/ane/atanu = 2/3/4/5 boys (notice the a at the start)
ibishyimbo bibiri/bitatu/bine/bitanu = 2/3/4/5 beans (bi at the start of the number this time).

So when I went to the market and pointed to a jerry can and said

"amajericani umwe" when what I should have said was "ijericani imwe" they simply didn't have a clue what I was talking about having got both the gender and the plural/singular bit wrong.

This is one of the cases where grammer needs to be taught from day one or you will simply get frustrated and give up because no-one understands you!

The 'r' 'l' problem I think is pretty universal. My students often wrote about plotons and erectrons and in the end I told them that if they thought it should be l to write r and vice versa as they consistently got them the wrong way round. In Kinyarwanda itself r and l are totally interchangable so that you can greet someone by saying either 'Muraho' or 'Mulaho' and they will not even notice the difference. I took to switching it up on a regalar basis in conversations in English just for fun and even took to introducing myslef as 'Lowena'.

A friend was told that in Africa they have animals with the same name as him. His name is Ryan.

On one occasion I was walking away from school when I caught up with a bunch of older boys who clearly should have been in class. When I asked them why they weren't studying they replied "It is OK madam. We have erections". I have to admit to finding it hard not to check;-)

Rowena

p.s. I learnt Kinyarwanda and Swahili initially purely for survival purposes as I lived in a tiny village where virtually no-one spoke English or French. My first priority was 'things that you can buy at the market'. Certainly with the grammer issues involved it would have made far more sense for our teacher to teach us entire sentences or phrases rather than individual words which then changed depending on a multitude of different factors. Size was also relevant

umugore = woman
akagore = small woman
abagore = women

Isashe = bag
akasashe = small bag

Greetings were obviously also a priority (changed not only depending on the time of day but also how many people you were greeting and whether they were more or less important than you) along with how to say please and thank you...which didn't take long to learn as Rwandan don't say please and rarely say thank you!

In the end it became as much about learning about the culture as it is about buying a 4 small bags of flour.

what a fascinating example that Rowena has told us!!

I think that we are all the more puzzled when we are learning a language which is VERY different from ours, when reality and nature are percieved in a totally different manner as ours. I think my lecturer (se my previous post) called it a 'cultural grid'.The usual examples are the fact that the Innuits have 20+ words for snow and the people of the Sahara have as many but for sand. I also heard that in Swahili (I think, Rowena can either prove me right or tell me off) there are only two words for colours... the way that foreign languages are spoken does give you as much information about the language itself as it does about its people, its traditions and its culture. Having said that it is very difficult to make youngsters understand that structures are different from one language to the next, that you can't translate literally, that it doesn't make sense.

Why can't you say 'running up the stairs in French'? why do you have to say 'going up the stairs while running'? was the latest I had to deal with in my year 11 class. Well because it is is the usual answer, I'm afraid...

Still, how fascinating, Rowena, you made my day...

Learning Hungarian was the most traumatic language learning experience in my life (I managed a project in Hungary from 1991 to 1996). Several problems hit me from day one:

1. The lexis has virtually no connections with other European languages, e.g. "bor" = "wine" and "sör" = "beer".

2. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means that words change their form substantially as a result of different prefixes, infixes and suffixes being added to them, e.g. "a felségemmel" means "with my wife", where "a" means "the", "feleség" means "wife", "-em-" means "my" and "-mel" means "with". There are no prepositions and possessive adjectives in Hungarian - it's all done by suffixes and infixes.

3. Word order can be very strange, with the verb normally falling at the end of the sentence, as in Latin, but not always... ...and I never really worked out why.

4. Hungarian has seven ways of expressing "you", depending on the relationship with the person you are talking to.

5. A man greets a woman with "Kezet csokolom" ("I kiss your hand"), but a woman greets a man with an expression corresponding to "Good morning" or something similar. "Hello!" is used for "Hello!" and "Goodbye!"

6. Questions are marked in speech only by intonation, but don't expect the intonation to correspond to question intonation in other European languages!

I could go on...

In reply to Audrey,

I'm not entirely sure about Swahili but in Kinyarwanda there are words for blue, green, red, white, black and yellow but pink, purple and orange are not concepts that they understand. However, there are about 20 words for different shades of brown. The reason for this is that the Banyarwanda love cows and keep enormous herds of them for prestigue reasons as much as anything else. In order to be able to distinguish between the different brown cows in a herd of several hundred it is useful to be able to describe them in terms of their brownness. Needless to say this was not something that I even considered adding to my vocab!

These cultural colur issues proved to be almost overwhleming when trying to get students to be able to identify compounds based on the colours resulting from different reactions. I had to introduce them to the concept of turquiose, royal blue (loyal brue), canary yellow, buff, purple, pink, orange etc etc. In the end I invested in a set of colouring pencils and made a colour chart on the wall so that they could match their solution to the colours listed. The problem not being that they couldn't 'see' the blue, simply that they didn't know where green and blue ended and turqoise began. Understandable considering. I'm not sure I could tell you the difference between beige, tan, oatmeal and buff:-)

Following on from Grahams descriptions of the cultural hurdles of Hungarian, in Kinyarwanda the word for brother is different depending on whether you are a man or a woman. I recall intrucing a male friend as my brother once hoping to deflect suggestions that we might be a couple and was greeted with hoots of laughter. The reason was not, as I thought, that they didn't believe me, just that they thought it hilarious that I thought I was a man:-) There is the same problem with sister, then there is the issue of whether the sibling is older or younger than you..etc etc

Something which I found interesting is that the word for Mother is 'Mama' and no, they did not get the word from the white colonists, it is a Bantu word used throughout East and Central Africa. I am assuming that this is because the first sounds a baby can make is 'Mama' or something similar.

The word for Father however is not 'dada' (I don't recall what it is but its something quite tricky). However the word for older sister is 'data'. Perhaps because the second sound a baby learns to make is dada/data and the second person who looks after the child in African culture is an older sister.

My favourite linked words in Kinyarwanda are

Inyama = meat
Inyamaswa = aminal

so we all know what animals are for:-)

Rowena