Why Learn a Language?
The GCSE results out this week cement the increasing decline of Britain’s reputation for language learning, particularly at comprehensive schools where that decline has gone into freefall.
At least the issue and the impact of not making languages compulsory post 14 is at last hitting the headlines. I have more than a passing interest in it since I studied languages at university, have considered becoming a languages teacher and have four half-Spanish children.
I would dearly love my children to be bilingual, but so far we have failed, for a variety of reasons. One is that we speak English at home and, though my partner has tried to break into Spanish every so often, he has not been consistent.
This is, in part, because his family is fiercely Catalan and thinks he should teach the children that first, although he thinks Spanish will be more useful. So he hovers between Catalan and Spanish, not knowing which to teach first.
I have tried to teach the children too since I have some experience giving classes in Spanish, French and English [in Spain], so far without success.
I tried, for instance, to do a role play where I was a customer at a Spanish café. I ordered my meal, and my eldest daughter said nothing. “Why aren’t you talking?” I asked her in Spanish. “I am the waitress who doesn’t speak,” she replied.
Meanwhile, my middle daughter merely murmured “ooga booga”.
Their primary school does teach French, but I don’t think it goes much further than the basics of colors and numbers. I wonder if this will be significantly improved when primary schools have to teach languages, given the lack of languages graduates coming out of universities.
Why, though, should British children study languages? After all, learning languages is hard and many people speak English nowadays. But learning languages in depth opens up more than a career as an interpreter or translator.
Language is a passport to understanding another culture.
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