As a nation, we are not known for our proficiency in foreign languages. The stereotype of the Brit abroad, repeating English slowly and loudly to the locals, has more than a grain of truth.
In England, language study has declined so much that the exam regulator, Ofqual, recently decided to lower grade boundaries in GCSE French and German to encourage teenagers to take them.
Can anything be done about our struggles? Or should we lighten up about it? A former Downing Street education expert has told i that seriously improving our language ability is not a high-enough priority to justify the vast expense involved.
In Britain, 34.6 per cent of people aged between 25 and 64 report that they know one or more foreign language, compared with an EU average of 64.8 per cent.
Lost in translation
GCSE and A-level language entries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have been declining since the turn of the century, although a rise in Spanish entries provides a shred of comfort.
In Scotland, language entries at National 4 and 5 level have dropped by about a fifth since 2014.
This has been accompanied by the quiet death of the foreign exchange, suffocated in part by exaggerated safety concerns. A survey by the British Council five years ago found that just four in 10 schools run trips involving a stay with a host family. Martha de Monclin, a British expat living in France, is often asked whether she knows British families who are happy to be involved in exchanges, but in seven years has found only one.
Where they do happen, pupils just go sightseeing and stay in hotels, she says. “With mobile phones, they are constantly connected to their friends and family at home. This makes it incredibly difficult to learn a language.”
‘I had to learn the rules of my own language first’
Samantha Lewis-Williams learned to speak fluent Italian from scratch during a year abroad at university – a pleasant surprise given she’d taken GCSE French but “could barely speak it”.
She thinks the secret is in the grammar. “Rather than teaching us set sentences, they focused on understanding grammar and how to construct sentences,” she says.
She also noticed that the British students had to get remedial lessons “to learn grammatical rules in our own language before we could start to tackle Italian”.
Her French and Spanish classmates “didn’t need these extra lessons, because they had been taught them at school”.
Weakening the incentive to learn
If things weren’t bad enough, Brexit is likely to pose further problems. If working on the Continent becomes more difficult for Britons, it may weaken the incentive to learn a language.
For some, the original sin which explains the fall of language learning in England was Labour’s decision in 2004 to end compulsory study of a language GCSE.
Others believe the problem has deeper roots. Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo, one of the world’s biggest language learning apps, tells i that Anglophone countries will always find it more difficult to teach foreign languages because people lack motivation.
‘The people we’ve seen that are best at learning a language are the ones that don’t care about sounding stupid’
“If you live in a non-English-speaking country and you know English, your income potential is double,” he claims.
“Duolingo’s users in English-speaking countries are “significantly more casual”, he adds.
For the most part “they’re playing a game” by using the app. If motivation is one problem, another is teaching methodology. Paul Noble struggled with languages at school. “I did German GCSE. I didn’t do very well,” he says.
But as an adult he became obsessed with languages and became fluent in French, Spanish, German and Italian before moving on to Mandarin.
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Trying to break boundaries
He now runs his own language centre, and has worked with about 10 languages.
Noble believes that “if maths were taught the way languages are, there would be an uproar because everyone would be innumerate”.
In UK schools, “the words they choose to teach you, the order they teach them in, the grammar they start with, everything is back to front,” he says.
He says that courses are split into random topics (“Today we’re going to deal with the toolshed”), and full of useless vocabulary.
“They teach you things like ‘bucket and spade’, but you can’t say ‘I want,’” he says.
At other times, students are bamboozled by grammatical terms which they are not taught in English. “If someone doesn’t tell you what it means to conjugate a verb, then when you’re in German and they say ‘conjugate the verb’, it is not helpful,” he adds drily.
‘We are teaching languages all wrong in the UK’
Julia Morneweg is a professional cellist who is learning Russian in her 30s.
She took up the language because her partner is Russian-British, and working in the classical music world, she has a lot of Russian colleagues who “will simply speak Russian to each other in rehearsal whether you understand a word of it or not”.
Her formidable work ethic as a musician has stood her in good stead. “My professional background means I am used to practising incredibly hard and I applied every bit of that dedication to my learning of the Russian language,” she says.
She also thinks we teach languages wrong. “Language teaching in the UK is largely based on memorising stock phrases, without really understanding the grammar that underpins it – which means you will never be able to use it with confidence and control,” she says. “In the end people get frustrated and drop the subject, which is such a shame.”
Change to teaching methods
However, things are changing. In England, the Government has set up a national centre to spread new teaching methods involving the building blocks of grammar and prioritising frequently used words. The Government has also just launched a review to make GCSE subject content more accessible.
And in 2014, the Government again made learning a foreign language compulsory in the latter years of primary school.
Jane Harvey, the president of the Association for Language Learning, says that the best primaries are focusing on, “how you engender a love of language, rather than saying everyone must be at a certain level”.
‘They teach you things like ‘bucket and spade’, but you can’t say ‘I want’’
She also has high hopes for the new curriculum being introduced in Wales in 2022. All pupils already have to study English and Welsh until 16. Under the new curriculum, they will also have to do at least one foreign language at primary school.
Nevertheless, Jonathan Simons, a former head of education in the Number 10 strategy unit, believes that reversing the decline isn’t worth the “opportunity cost”.
He tells i: “The vast majority of people in the UK who end up going into the labour market will not need to speak a foreign language.”
‘I have met some amazing linguists from this country’
René Koglbauer is a professor in the education department at Newcastle University, and a former school language teacher.
An Austrian, he thinks the British need to lay off the relentless self-criticism when it comes to languages.
“I have come across some amazing linguists in this country, people who have mastered two, three or more languages,” he says.
“My biggest plea is to the media and politicians to be at the forefront of this change of widely held perceptions – there are many great stories out there. Let’s for once celebrate these.”
Training more teachers
If we wanted to eliminate our language deficit, it would have to be the highest-priority education initiative for the next decade, he adds. It would mean finding thousands of new language teachers, and implementing a vast programme so that primary school teachers could learn a second language, and then teach it.
Simons acknowledges that the “economic centre of the world is moving east”, and that there may be a case to boost the learning of Asian languages at some point. But he suspects that is still years away.
Noble admits we can probably get away with rubbing along as a monoglot nation. But he says going to a country such as China and speaking the language makes an “indescribable” difference to the quality of the exchange.
Besides, he adds, the value of learning a language can’t be fully captured in a figure on the balance sheet of UK plc.
There is also the joy of broadening cultural horizons. Or, as he puts it when asked why he wanted to speak another language: “I thought it would be pretty cool.”
Top tips — How to learn a language
Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo, has two tips for learning a language. The first is to accept the cold reality that it takes time and work. “The more time you put in the better. It’s not magic,” he tells i.
The second piece of advice is to use your target language while abroad – don’t surrender to embarrassment by reverting to your native tongue.
“I suffer from this,” Von Ahn admits. “I’m very ashamed – when I’m not nearly perfect in a language, I don’t want to talk because I feel like you’re going to judge me.”
He adds: “The people we’ve seen that are best at learning a language are the ones that don’t care about sounding stupid.”