Graham Davies

According to a recent survey, knowing a foreign language can boost your income, and foreign language speakers are also seen as sexier, more intelligent and more interesting: BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3966413.stm But this year the government removed the requirement for all children in England to study a foreign language to GCSE level. So, is it the government's aim to produce a poorer, boring, less intelligent and less sexy population?

Jean writes: This is also true of modern languages. Children who grow up bilingually have a distinct advantage over children living in monolingual households. Children who grow up speaking French, German or Spanish at home tend to outperform children learning these languages at school by a wide margin. Children who speak community languages at home tend to fare better when they begin to learn another language at school. I used to teach in an HE college that was located in an area where several community languages were spoken (Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and Polish). We had a significant number of students from these communities who took degrees in French, German and Spanish. Once you have learned one foreign language, the second one seems easier. Finland is a bilingual country: Finnish and Swedish. All Finns are "aware" of Swedish even though the language may not be spoken that well by Finns who do not live in Swedish-speaking communities. On the other hand, all Finns learn English at school up to a high level - they have to in order to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. According to a recent survey, knowing a foreign language can boost your income, and foreign language speakers are also seen as sexier, more intelligent and more interesting: BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3966413.stm

John writes: Academic books, in my experience as a series editor for a major international publising house, tend not to sell very well. A typical initial print run is 500, but sales may not even achieve this figure. The last volume that I edited, entitled "ICT and language learning: a European perspective", sold around 250 copies worldwide. It was the outcome of a series of seminars that formed part of a project funded by the European Commission. John writes: My New Year's resolution for 2005 is to produce no more academic papers. I intend to concentrate on keeping the ICT4LT website up to date and to produce the occasional monograph that I will publish on my own website: http://www.ict4lt.org - does OK with an average of 600+ visits per day. http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/freestuff.htm - around 40-50 visits per day. Oh, and I also intend to reduce my golf handicap and become a better skiier - must work on my carving turns...

French has already become a major casualty, particularly in the European Union. The expansion of the EU has accelerated the adoption of English as a lingua franca - which was well on the way before the admission of the new member states earlier this year. There is some concern in the European Commission that the goal of every EU citizen speaking their mother tongue plus two foreign languages is unlikely to be achieved. England has already opted out by making the study of a foreign language optional beyond the age of 14, and other countries in the EU are cutting down on the teaching of a second foreign language (i.e. other than English) in secondary education. Spanish has overtaken German as the second foreign language studied in secondary schools in England - which is not surprising in view of the popularity of Spain as a holiday destination and the fact that Spanish is extremely useful as a world language. On the other hand, native German speakers in Europe outnumber French native speakers by a considerable margin, which probably makes German more useful as a language for people who wish to travel around central Europe - which is certainly my experience as a fluent speaker of German. The influence of French has not extended eastwards in Europe, where German is spoken much more widely as a first or second foreign language. Watch out for the spread of Chinese as China becomes commercially more powerful. It could easily eclipse English as a world language.

French has already become a major casualty, particularly in the European Union. The expansion of the EU has accelerated the adoption of English as a lingua franca - which was well on the way before the admission of the new member states earlier this year. There is some concern in the European Commission that the goal of every EU citizen speaking their mother tongue plus two foreign languages is unlikely to be achieved. England has already opted out by making the study of a foreign language optional beyond the age of 14, and other countries in the EU are cutting down on the teaching of a second foreign language (i.e. other than English) in secondary education. Spanish has overtaken German as the second foreign language studied in secondary schools in England - which is not surprising in view of the popularity of Spain as a holiday destination and the fact that Spanish is extremely useful as a world language. On the other hand, native German speakers in Europe outnumber French native speakers by a considerable margin, which probably makes German more useful as a language for people who wish to travel around central Europe - which is certainly my experience as a fluent speaker of German. The influence of French has not extended eastwards in Europe, where German is spoken much more widely as a first or second foreign language. Watch out for the spread of Chinese as China becomes commercially more powerful. It could easily eclipse English as a world language.

David writes: I sympathise fully. I had already got out of secondary education and into higher education by the time Margaret Thatcher came into power, but the control-freak mentality that characterised the Thatcher government's attitude to secondary school teachers began to encroach upon higher education too. By 1993 I had had enough and took early retirement. The freedom that I used to have when I joined the teaching profession was taken away from me, but I have now regained that freedom as a free-lancer.

Tim writes: I wonder what people make of my background. It’s very interdisciplnary: 1. Specialised in Modern Languages in the sixth form at school 2. Read German and French at university 3. Completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education course 4. Researched (for PhD) into the terminology of the Medieval German Tournament and Heraldry 5. Developed an interest in ICT and have written numerous publications on ICT and Modern Languages 6. 19-handicap in golf 7. Former scuba diving instructor 8. Competent intermediate skiier 9. I can strip down and rebuild a motor vehicle engine I am not sure how this contributed to my skills as a teacher

I agree 100%. The rot set in with the introduction of the National Curriculum - a reflection of the control-freak mentality of the Thatcher years and which our current government in the UK has built upon instead of dismantling it. I have been to Finland many times. My general impression is that the Finns are a hard-working, well-educated nation. Virtually everyone speaks English. The spelling system of their own language, as David Wilson points out, is more or less phonetic, but its grammar and lexis are impenetrable to visitors from other countries.

Ted writes: Agreed! The early 1980s were a boom period in the UK. I travelled a lot in the 1980s, with my BBC Micro in my carry-on flight bag, demonstrating British educational software to teachers all over Europe. Ted writes: What a great project! I demonstrated the Domesday videodisc all over Europe too. It was way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it only worked on British hardware, and the kit was a bit Heath-Robinson: BBC Micro or RM Nimbus linked to a Philips-compatible videodisc player, but it worked marvellously. Recently produced CD-ROM-based multimedia packages still haven’t caught up with the Domesday Project. Read more about the Domesday Project here: http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html The valuable data gathered during the duration of the project was in danger of being lost, however, as both the media and the hardware are no longer widely available. This has resulted in a major rescue operation: the CAMiLEON Project (University of Leeds and University of Michigan): http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/ Data preservation is an area of major concern these days, as both hardware and software quickly become obsolete – in contrast to the original Domesday Book of 1086. See the Long Now website: http://www.longnow.org/ As for modernisation, I suppose that making modern foreign languages compulsory for children in schools in England only up to the age of 14 constitutes “modernisation” – in an expanding European Union, where virtually all children in our partner countries study at least one foreign language up to school-leaving age. Knowledge of modern foreign languages is already becoming the preserve of the elite in England – just as it was in the 19th century.

Derek writes: While it is true that protecting business secrets may be one of the reasons that bugs remain in many of Microsoft's products, I am more inclined to believe that it is sheer incompetence - which is as much a feature of open source software developers as it is of any other kind of software. Moreover, programming is no longer as straightforward as it used to be. I remember well the days of BBC BASIC when (after a bit of effort) I could understand what was going wrong in the code that I wrote. Nowadays programs are so complex, using dynamic link libraries and other links containing stuff that no one seems to understand, that it is impossible to view the whole of the big picture. I am currently in dispute with O2 because each month since September 04 they have been blocking my mobile phone number due to late payment of my monthly bill. What appears to have happened is that they have commissioned a software company to write a new accounting program that fails to recognise that my bill is always paid in response to a direct request from O2 to my credit card company to debit my credit card around 14 days after the bill is presented. The new accounting program does not recognise this delay of 14 days. O2 know that this is going on, but they can't appear to get the software writers to fix it.

I never use Outlook (a.k.a. as Look Out!) because it is often targeted by hackers and viruses. I use Eudora. I do, however, use IE, which did cause me a problem by letting in the first Web-borne viruses that appeared a few years ago. Now I have a firewall and other layers of protection to keep the nasties out. I am not really sure that you can blame Microsoft entirely, however. The virus writers, spyware writers and hackers would target any operating system that became the dominant system throughout the world, wouldn't they? We count visitors to my business website, and we can also identify the operating systems and browsers that they use to access the site. Win users dominate, so it's obvious why they keep getting targeted by virus writers and hackers. Mac users show up as only 2% of all visitors, and we were visited by only 167 Linux users worldwide in the last year. Having said that, I find Windows a tacky system. I never buy the latest version of Windows, as Microsoft has a policy of field-testing its products among its customers, and the first releases are alway full of bugs. I still use Win98SE, which is relatively stable and which, incidentally, shows up as the most commonly used operating system by our website visitors.

Have you tried purging your system with SpyBot Search and Destroy? It's free: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html It found 14 examples of spyware on my system when I used it for the first time. Hijack This will reveal bits and pieces that may have been added to your browser without your knowledge: http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html You need to use it with care. When I used it for the first time it was obvious that certain buttons and references had been added to my browser that I definitely did not want!

Dear Julie Has your colleague never heard of concordancers? These are widely used in teaching both English and MFL and also for literary and linguistic research. Let's suppose you set your students an essay topic concerned with animal imagery in Shakespeare - OK, not a very exciting topic, but it will serve to illustrate my point. Using a concordancer and a Shakepeare corpus you can key in the names of various animals and find contexts in which they are mentioned, i.e. locate the data that you need for your essay topic. In other words, you are using ICT as an aid to research. See Module 2.4 at the ICT4LT site: http://www.ict4lt.org Although this module is concerned mainly with MFL there are numerous examples that relate to English resources too. I first developed an interest in ICT in 1976, but my imagination was really fired by a course on Computing in the Humanities that I attended way back in 1979, organised under the auspices of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC). It focused mainly on using authentic literary resources and exploiting them with a variety of tools, such as concordancers. See http://www.allc.org I was Sub-Editor of the ALLC Journal for a short while in the early 1980s. There's an enormous amount of activity in this area throughout the world, and it's not restricted to dry, academic research.

If you visit my local pub you’ll find at least a dozen Prince Charles’s – but the opinions they express are often pretty stupid too. Have you noticed, however, how the “everyone’s a winner” mentality is creeping into every aspect of our lives? Years ago, if you owned a “gold” credit card, it said something about your level of income. Now everyone has a “gold” card, because “gold” is the starting point, moving on to “platinum”, “platinum-plus” etc. Have you tried buying a “small” cup of coffee at one of those railway station coffee stalls? “Small” as a measurement of quantity no longer exists, and so on…

Like Mike, I'm no great fan of the Royals and of Prince Charles, and I don't see the point in making a big issue out of this. Many people would probably agree with Prince Charles on the question of "a system that admits no failure" - but then one can argue that such a system is by no means as widespread as he thinks. The incident that I related regarding my daughter is, however, true and gave me considerable concern at the time. Why had her teachers failed to spot that she was lazy and nevertheless continued to praise her poor work? While it is unfair not to give encouragement to children who are trying as hard as they can and who simply lack the ability to become high flyers, one also need to be honest about their achievements relative to their peers. Once schoolchildren reach the outside world, potential employers won't hesitate in turning done those that do not come up to scratch.

Contact John Hibbs at the Benjamin Franklin Institute: http://www.bfranklin.edu John is a a radio enthusiast, including radio on the Web.

Picking up the thread of the Internet as a threat... My younger daughter had a bad experience as a result of joining a chat room. One of the contributors kept asking for her real name and email address and threatened to commit suicide if she didn't tell him. As a susceptible teenager at the time, she was frightened by this experience and she began to feel guilty about ignoring the persistent contributor. My advice was: "Leave the chat room and let him top himself!". So she left the chat room and hasn't indulged in this kind of activity again. I think we may have reached a point where the Internet needs to be properly policed - but then the question arises as to who does the policing. Actually, the Internet is closely watched by the police and security services already. A friend of my elder daughter, who is a Detective Chief Inspector, spent a couple of years tracking down paedophiles via the Internet - not a pleasant experence, she said. I know people in the USA, working for the State Department, who are involved in the development of transcription software that produces printed output of radio and TV broadcasts in Arabic and automatic gist translations. Then there is a whole industry devoted to automatic authorship identification of texts written by potential terrorists: http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/authorship.htm Big Brother is already watching you! As Andrew says, one could say that the telephone is a dangerous invention. Indeed it can be - but most people use it for legitimate purposes. And, of course, telephone tapping has been a feature of anti-terrorist activities for a very long time. Voice and speech recognition software was developed as long ago as the early 1980s by GCHQ. And then there was Operation Tinkerbell at the time of the miners' strike...

I tend to agree with Mike about going I recall the problems I had with one of my daughters during her teens. Her "self-image" - which was cultivated by her school environment and her peers - was so inflated that she simply did not perceive how much hard work she had to put in order to achieve success. I would sometimes look at her school exercise books and I was often surprised to read congratulatory comments that the teachers had written on what I considered to be very poor work. If I made any adverse comments about the teachers' comments to her I was accused of being "old-fashioned" and setting standards that were far too high. At the age of 16 my daughter failed 6 out of 7 GCSEs - and it finally dawned on her that she was aiming at far too low a target. In the next two years in the sixth form she passed 6 GCSEs and 2 A-levels and gained a place at art college. She now runs a successful graphic design business. As Mike says,

Just a couple of observations regarding E-Julie’s message: Email can be maddening. I nearly went crazy this summer when my business suffered a spam hijack, but… My wife and I are in regular email contact with our cousins in British Columbia and a long-lost friend in Australia. The time differences in our countries makes telephone conversation difficult. For example, we can only phone our cousins in BC after one in the morning (our time) on weekdays, which coincides with the time that they get home from work. We exchange digital photographs of our grandchildren – very quick and very cheap! Asynchronous email means that we “talk” to one another more often. The long-lost friend in Australia is a woman whom my wife and I met in the Swinging Sixties in London. We had great times together. Our friend married an Australian in the early 1970s and then emigrated. For a few years we remained in touch by letter, but then – for various reasons, including a broken marriage (the friend’s marriage, not ours!) – we lost touch. Early last year my wife joined Friends Reunited and tried to track down our old friend. I was able to remember her maiden name, and my wife was able to remember the area of London where she went to secondary school. On the first search the name of the long-lost friend appeared. We fired off an email, referring to the fun years that all three of us enjoyed in the 1960s. Bingo! We hit the jackpot. We now regularly exchange emails – and we have also telephoned one another on several occasions. Modern communications can be wonderful!

David writes (cited): I spent 25 years in education and I have spent 22 years running a business. Both overlapped for around 11 years. Some of the things that I learned in running a business were highly relevant to my appointment as director of a university language centre, e.g. the necessity of keeping accurate accounts, an inventory of equipment and materials, shopping around for the best deals, etc. The main difference between a business and education is that in business one has to focus on making a profit, so that one can draw a reasonable salary each month. In this respect a business has to ensure that the goods and services that it sells are in demand. One rarely undertakes a project that is unlikely to generate income. In education, however, many projects are undertaken because they are perceived as “ a good thing”. I left full-time teaching in 1993 – for several reasons, but partly because my university was becoming too “business-like” and many of the noble things that we did were being dropped simply because they didn’t generate income. The bean counters had taken over. To give one example: I was managing an EC-funded TEMPUS project at the time that this cultural change was taking place. The TEMPUS project involved ICT and language training in Hungary, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Block. TEMPUS was paid for out of European taxpayers’ money and generated no income whatsoever for my university – but it did not cost us anything either as the funding came from the EC. The new chief finance officer (who had formerly worked in business) could not understand this. She asked me what was the point of a project that did not generate income. I explained that TEMPUS aimed to help raise the skills level of former Soviet Block countries, bringing them into line with Western Europe. She then asked what the university got out of it. I explained that it gave staff the opportunity to travel and to gain new experiences working in a different cultural environment, that it was immensely rewarding to see the results of one labours, and that it raised the profile of our university, etc, etc. This fell on deaf ears, and for a time I was concerned that we would be forced to pull out of the project. We did not however, and the project came to a successful conclusion in 1996. My university began to get into serious financial trouble shortly afterwards, resulting in a drastic pruning operation in which the foreign languages and English language schools were closed. Humanities disappeared too. Only the profit-making schools remained. So much for running a university like a business...

Mike writes: It's getting like that in the UK too. The turnout in local council elections is usually bad - around 30% in the area where I live, for example. General elections usually attract a higher turnout. I have always exercised my right to vote in every election since I reached voting age. But I did not bother to vote in the last election for the European Parliament. This the first time in my life that indifference got the better of me. I did not like any of the candidates, and I am completely disillusioned with party politics, especially in the European context. Looking back on my life, I can't honestly say that either of the two major parties has done me any great favours.

Not really humour in the classroom, but humour in school: I was invited to a modern foreign languages open day at St Paul's Girls’ School, London, during the 1980s, where I gave a presentation on interactive video. A number of teachers and students of languages from a Baptist college in the USA had also been invited to attend the open day. During lunch the High Mistress (sic), the late Baroness Brigstocke, circulated among the tables, all of which had been supplied with ample quantities of (rather good) French wine. She stopped at my table, which I was sharing with several of the American teachers, and was surprised to find two or three unopened bottles. The Americans were all drinking water. "Oh!" the High Mistress exclaimed in her wonderful cut-glass accent, "I thought one of the reasons for studying foreign languages was that it gave one an excuse for travelling to countries where one could sample the local wine". She was a great character, with a great sense of humour. Sadly missed.

Probably my most embarrassing moment as a teacher - but funny too: I had just returned from a school exchange trip to Germany with a party of 20 children and decided to arrange a party for staff, children and parents to show colour slides, talk about the trip, etc. I got three of the sixth-form girls who accompanied me on the trip to make the arrangements, contacting parents, ordering refreshments, etc. The one thing I had forgotten was to tell them in which room the party would take place. On the day of the party one of the sixth-form girls knocked on the door of the classroom where I was teaching a 4th-form German set, and popped her head round the door asking, "Sir, where are we going to have it tonight?" The whole class dissolved into laughter, and it took me some time to gain control.

I found the monkey chants disgusting. We used to hear them in this country - but this does not happen so often now. The England team should have walked off.

It probably works in Modern Foreign Languages. In mixed sex schools, boy tend to regard languages as a "girls' subject" - and there are dozens of published reports and articles that confirm this and that boys perform poorly in languages in mixed sex schools. French in particular is regarded as "cissy" by boys, but German, Spanish and Italian are regarded in a more positive light. However, French is the dominant language in most secondary schools - which is due partly to its traditional position as the No. 1 foreing language, partly to the fact that is is better resourced in terms of books and other materials, and partly to the fact that teachers of languages other than French are had to find. I attended a single sex grammar school in the 1950s/60s. The arts subjects were regarded by some as "effeminate", but languages were always a strong subject and most boys obtained at least one O-level in a foreign language (which was compulsory for university entrance at the time). With two thirds of state secondary schools in England now abandoning the teaching of languages to children aged 14+, we are in a crisis situation. We are approaching a situation where modern foreign languages will be offered only to the majority of children in independent prep and independent secondary schools - i.e. back to the elitist situation of the 19th century, where only the middle/upper classes learned a foreign language at school. If single sex teaching can help rectify this situation - maybe French for girls and another language for boys - then I am in favour of it.