I was reading this article on yesterday’s Observer and could not help to feel dismay and a certain sense of bewilderment at the state of Modern Foreign Languages teaching in England, where languages are no longer compulsory at secondary education and where pupils have been found to be abandoning language learning in droves.
The government thought that relieving compulsion from language learning at secondary could be offset by the introduction of compulsory language learning at primary, in theory targeting pupils when they are more linguistically receptive and therefore priming them to want to continue studying languages at secondary level, as an optional subject.
There is no evidence that this approach is working. What is certain however is that removing languages from the compulsory curriculum at the secondary stage before a clear strategy for the learning of languages at the primary stage was implemented, some would say before it was even thought of, has been a big mistake.
Whether you agree or not with the removal of compulsion for languages at secondary (some language teachers are happy to be teaching only pupils who have opted to study a language, therefore avoiding the more difficult made-to-learn-languages pupils), it is clear that we are reverting to a situation in which languages are only taught at independent (private) schools, selective grammar schools and specialist language colleges.
Once again it is only the privileged few who will reap the benefits of being able to understand and converse competently (not necessarily fluently!) in another language.
It is however no surprise to me that pupils opt to drop a subject which is wrongly perceived both as difficult and of little use. Languages are not a core subject. The mere choice of words indicates to a badly informed prospective student or parent that languages are not that important, not a core subject.
I often hear from teachers that the government ought to do this or that, but I think that it is also down to us teachers to dismantle some of the myths surrounding MFL learning. I am convinced that individual teachers have the power to influence what goes on in MFL.
According to both the article and my experience, teenagers view languages as hard and boring. It strikes me that those two points are something we teachers can actually do something about. Languages don’t have to be hard or boring. I don’t expect my GCSE students to be fluent in Spanish at age 16! I just want to teach them a good grounding and instill in them an interest to take the subject further if they so wish and I want to do so in a way that is both fun and effective.
So what can we do to get students interested in languages again? Simply telling them that learning languages is a good thing for their future plainly does not work, as the average 14 year old cannot see any future beyond the weekend. In my opinion, there is one thing that you can be doing if your language intake is dwindling and you are worried about it:
Use technology to help you make language learning more accessible, relevant and more suited to the needs and expectations of teenagers in the 21st century.
If you are reading this, then you are probably familiar with the concept of blogging or podcasting and possibly use some technology already in your lessons. If however you have your doubts or are unsure about how to do it or what you can do, I have prepared these 10 suggestions for using technology in your classroom to interest your students and to enhance teaching and learning:
- Never use technology for the sake of using technology. Ensure instead that the use of technology is warranted within your schemes of work and that it will help you achieve your lesson objectives.
- Use streaming video in your classroom. The advent of broadband has facilitated the inclusion of video straight from the internet within lessons. Authentic video material from sites like YouTube or national TV broadcasters’ websites, such as TVE or Canal+ are a fantastic way to expose reluctant teenagers to the popular culture other reluctant teenagers enjoy in their native countries.
- Use more music. Teenagers are fanatical about music. The likelihood is that they use iTunes and so should you! Find out what type of music they are into and try to get similar music in the target language, which you can then use in your lessons.
- Use teleconferencing tools, such as Skype, to put your students in touch with students in partner schools abroad. They’ll realise there are other people in the same situation in other countries and might even end up establishing relationships they can follow up using MSM Chat, Hotmail, etc.
- Create your own interactive exercises. You know your pupils’ strengths and weaknesses better than anyone, so why be stuck with exercises done by other people for other people? Make your own using tools such as Hot Potatoes or game makers from ContentGenerator.net or LanguagesOnline Australia and then get your school teccie to put them on the school’s website or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). You can see my interactive Spanish exercises here.
- Use your interactive whiteboard more effectively. Go on a course and learn the basics. A little knowledge goes a long way helping you create more effective interactive classroom activities for you and your pupils. I have posted some tutorials here.
- Create your own podcasts. They are technically easy to do and once they are done they can be downloaded again and again, year after year. Think about them as lessons to take away. Alternatively get your pupils to make them! You can get started using Audacity.
- Start a subject blog, a class blog or a wiki to showcase your pupils’ work and achievements, providing a focus for their efforts and adding an extra dimension to your teaching. Perhaps you are feeling adventurous and want to make use of some of the online social networks your pupils frequent, such as Facebook, as an educational tool.
- Use internet tools more often to help you prepare lessons or to help your pupils with their class or homework. Using tools such as Voki, Wordle or Animoto, just to name three I have been exploring this year, will help motivate you and your pupils.
- Make the most of your pupils’ gadgets. They all have iPods or other mp3 players and mobile phones, most of which come with a camera nowadays, so why not set them a video task using their mobiles or create or find resources they can put on their iPods?
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list and neither do I pretend that it will solve the problems with language intake in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, but they are things we teachers can do despite past and present government policy errors.
What do you think?
Photos from Flickr 1 2
This post is tagged Blogging & Podcasting, internet resources, Teaching and Schools
