Debates in Modern Languages Education

Patricia Driscoll, Ernesto Macaro, Ann Swarbrick, Patricia Driscoll, Ernesto Macaro, Ann Swarbrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415658324
• eBook ISBN: 9781317931034
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in Modern Languages Education offers a comprehensive introduction and synthesis of the major themes and research evidence in language learning and teaching today, providing an up-to-date, authoritative review of traditional and contemporary issues in language teaching.

With chapters by leading experts in the field, thematic sections explore and consider:

• the importance of a wide range of different knowledge bases and skills for effective teaching
• how to become expert practitioners
• approaches to teaching with reference to relevant theories, complex constructs, and empirical research
• the innovations and ideas that shape and will shape the discipline for the next decade.

Each thought-provoking chapter is supported by reference to further reading and additional material to encourage deeper exploration which will help the reader to fully engage in the debates presented. This book is a valuable resource for any student or practising teacher engaged in initial teacher education, continuing professional development and Masters level study.

Part IOverview

Chapter 1 Languages over the past 40 yearsDoes history repeat itself?

Richard Johnstone

DOI: 10.4324/9781315856551-3

Introduction

Covering all four nations of the UK, the British Academy Report (2013) on the current state of languages in UK society offers a stark message. Among its claims are that ‘there is strong evidence that the UK suffers from a growing deficit in languages skills’ and that ‘the range and nature of languages being taught is insufficient to meet current and future demands’. It argues that ‘a weak supply of languages skills is pushing down demand and creating a vicious circle of monolingualism’ and it states that ‘languages spoken by British schoolchildren, in addition to English, represent a valuable future source of supply’ (British Academy, 2013: 4–5).

Given the enormous efforts made over several decades across the UK with the aim of enabling education at primary and secondary school to help the UK become more multilingual, it would be easy to become disheartened. Nonetheless, there have been many successes in languages at school where the aim is not limited to the largely instrumental perspective that properly informs the British Academy Report. The report deserves to be taken seriously, but one remembers another prestigious report (the Nuffield Languages Inquiry, Nuffield Foundation, 2000) that created great interest but was not implemented to the extent that had been hoped. Moreover, although the National Languages Strategy¹ did not apply across the UK as a whole, it was a major initiative, yet where is it now?

When thinking of languages policies in the UK, we recognise that there are four nations, each with its own administration for education at school. Admittedly, there are similarities between England, Wales and Northern Ireland (e.g. the terms ‘GCSE’ and ‘Key Stages’) whereas Scotland differs in its curriculum and its national examinations. Moreover, pupils in Scotland go to secondary school one year later than elsewhere in the UK. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are similar, in that education at school in each case has a responsibility for contributing to the maintenance and revitalisation of a heritage Celtic language (Gaelic, Irish and Welsh).

All four nations have significant numbers of students at school with a home ‘community language’ such as Punjabi, Urdu, Polish, Cantonese. The challenge for our educational systems is to find ways of building on the skills possessed in sometimes partial and halting form by young people at school who belong to communities that speak these languages, so that they benefit from having a home language as well as English and our society benefits both culturally and instrumentally.

Four Emerging Challenges

Despite the variations referred to above, I now turn to four challenges that are common across the UK, all of which have emerged strongly over the last 40 years. These have been and still are:

• enabling the learning and use of additional languages to flourish when English is increasingly the dominant language not only of the UK but also of globalisation
• extending the learning of a Modern Language successfully across the full range of abilities in the early years of secondary education
• achieving good numbers taking languages from the point at which they become optional, usually post-14²
• implementing Modern Languages at Primary School (MLPS).

The first of these challenges arises from the nature of UK society. The other three all arise from policy decisions, directions, intentions or aspirations. No nation in the UK has been convincingly successful in meeting any of these challenges. However, I shall reflect on some issues that have arisen over the past 40 years or more and will be happy to share some thoughts at the end.

Methodologies Compared

I was asked that my discussion should start from 40 years ago. This was roughly when I became a member of staff at the University of Stirling. At this time, the fourth challenge (above) was already in difficulty, and the Burstall Report (Burstall et al, 1974) would effectively remove MFL from most state primary schools until a second wave of MLPS would begin in the early 1990s. However, attempts to meet the second challenge (above) were in full swing, and this necessitated a big methodological re-think.

The first research book I purchased in my new post was the Pennsylvania Project (Smith and Berger, 1968). Although the project took place in the USA, the issues it confronted applied equally in the UK. It sought to evaluate the relative merits of three approaches to MFL teaching: the traditional method based on grammar-translation (GT); the audio-lingual (AL) method based on teaching functional skills; and a modified version of this. The findings did not show significant differences among the three approaches. Such however was the climate of the times that Rebecca Valette wrote in some frustration: ‘succinct press releases have proclaimed the superiority of the traditional method and the disgrace of the language laboratory’ (Valette, 1969: 396).

As a pupil at secondary school, beginning in the early 1950s, I experienced the GT approach, and as a young schoolteacher towards the end of the 1960s I tried out AL in class and the language laboratory. I admired the expertise that went into the Pennsylvania research. However, my experience as a student at school and then in schoolteaching had alerted me to possible differences between an approach elaborated by experts and the same approach implemented in class by teachers.

Reflecting for example on the GT approach that I had experienced as a beginner learner of French at age 12 in my first year of secondary education (there being no modern languages in Scottish state primary schools in those days), I enjoyed it. We began by focusing on the phonetic written representation of all of the sounds of French — e.g. the phonetics for the four different nasal sounds in un bon vin blanc. This helped greatly with correct pronunciation. Later in our first year we were taught the alphabetical spelling of the words we had learnt phonetically, so we were not knocked off course by the strange-looking way in which these words were spelled alphabetically. Also, we were taught the grammar of written French, and to learn from grammar books and dictionaries. By the end of our second year we had covered all of the tenses of French and were working our way through genuine texts of French literature, such as Jules Verne's Adventures of Captain Hatteras:

C'était un hardi dessein qu'avait eu le capitaine Hatteras de s'élever jusqu'au nord, et de réserver a l'Angleterre, sa patrie, la gloire de découvrir le pôle boréal du monde … après avoir poussé son brick le Forward au-dela des mers connues, enfin, après avoir accompli la moitié de la tâche, il voyait ses grands projets subitement anéantis!

This ignited my imagination through phrases such as au-delà des mers connues (beyond the charted seas). We also learnt Latin. The two languages were taught in the same way: reading, writing, vocabulary and grammar, leading to genuine literature, with no distractions in the form of spoken language. Yes, it was a one-sided approach that suited top-stream pupils and that would not be fit for purpose today. I never met a real French person during my entire time at school, but both French and Latin as a means of creating an imagined reality were superb. Then, as now, the amount of time per week for learning modern languages was very limited, but the approach was ruthlessly efficient in that it almost completely cut out spoken language and emphasised learning on the basis of linguistic principles, taking the willing learner quickly and efficiently to a valued literary pay-off. Some of the problems experienced in modern languages today arise in my view from too much being attempted in too limited a time-frame.

Comprehensivisation

With the advent of comprehensive schooling in the 1960s, the extension of a modern language across the full ability range in the initial years of secondary education got underway. Language laboratories, tape recorders, overhead projectors, film-strips, duplication machines (producing an infinite supply of ‘worksheets’), were used in order to make the language accessible to the much wider range of students. A few audio-visual French and German courses came to dominate the scene. These helped but I remember analysing one such course based on a family of white Caucasian ethnicity: a father and a mother (married to each other), two boys (tending to be mischievous), a girl (well-behaved) in a detached house with garage (containing car and bicycles) and garden — not much connection to the lives of many UK pupils learning the language or of young people in the foreign country concerned.

At the time the Scottish Office Education Department was willing to fund research projects on foreign language teaching in schools. I was fortunate to have the opportunity of working with the outstanding Rosamond Mitchell and Brian Parkinson in a study producing a segmental analysis of the discourse of MFL classrooms in the first year of secondary education in 1977/1978 (Mitchell et al., 1981) in which a well-known audio-visual course was used. Classrooms were found to be ‘busy, work-oriented places, with a heavy emphasis on oral FL activities’ but it was found also that

these large amounts of oral FL usage were limited in several ways. Most of the observed FL activities involved the intensive, repetitive manipulation of very restricted sets of language elements; extensive exposure to any richer FL diet was rare … Missing also was any effective individualisation of the language learning process. The pupils in the classes we studied received virtually identical language experiences, which moreover almost always centred on the teacher.

(Mitchell et al, 1981: 66)

Three HMI reports offer a picture of the situation in England. Their 1977 report found that most MFL teachers had difficulty in dealing with low-ability groups. Their 1985 report, however, found sufficient evidence that a foreign language experience for all up to the age of 16 can be feasible and beneficial, but their 1989 report found continuing problems with the teaching of modern languages in inner city or urban schools.

Gradually a more learner-centred approach emerged in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s. This was the era of ‘personalisation’ in which pupils were encouraged to learn the MFL so as to be able to talk about their own real selves. This was an excellent idea as an antidote to the audio-visual stereotypes described above, so long as over time it grew in range, complexity and depth in order to keep up with students' emerging interests and cognitive development — but sadly this did not always happen. This was also a time to work towards ‘graded objectives’ which were to some extent influenced by functional-notional syllabus design, as enunciated particularly by the Council of Europe, and to engage in a variety of ‘communicative’ activities. Teachers were encouraged to use diagnostic assessment for providing feedback to learners; and to collaborate across schools, often under the banner of Graded Objectives in Modern Languages, so there was an Oxford group, a Leicester group, a Lothian group etc. Brian Page (2004) rightly argues that GOML was about much more than graded objectives; it was about teachers engaging in reflection, discussion and collaboration across many different aspects of their activity. Collaborative developments such as these made a highly positive contribution to MFL teaching in schools.

Upper secondary school

A major problem has been the diminishing numbers taking a MFL to the highest level in the upper secondary school. Suzanne Graham (2004) indicates that the numbers taking French at A-level in England, Wales and Northern Ireland dropped from 27, 245 in 1990 to 15, 605 in 2002, while Joanna McPake et al. (1999) indicate that in Scotland the numbers taking the Higher examination in French dropped from 11, 610 in 1976 to 4, 840 in 1997.

Graham's (2004) study looked at students in Year 11, the final year of compulsory education, leading to GCSE; in Year 12 (AS level); and Year 13 (A-level). The Year 11 students were from top-ability sets and expressed positive attitudes towards French, but those predicted to obtain high grades were not convinced they were necessarily doing well at French. Graham considered this might indicate low self-esteem and reported: ‘this suggests that students do not feel that success in an external examination is necessarily the same as achieving linguistic proficiency’ (Graham, 2004: 186). One of Graham's conclusions was that Learner Strategy Instruction might be a good way of helping learners become aware that their learning might be improved if they learnt to employ strategies appropriately and effectively.

McPake et al.'s (1999) study identified a ‘climate of negativity’ in which a number of negative factors conspired together. These included examiners' comments that the standards of performance at Higher were not necessarily high; the views of some principal teachers that some students taking Higher were not interested in the subject and were not necessarily capable of bridging the big gap from Standard Grade in Fourth Year to Higher in Fifth Year; a more general social view (e.g. among parents and in businesses) that learning languages can be difficult and tedious, allied to the absence of any strong belief in the instrumental value of language learning. As Graham was to find subsequently in England, students judged to be competent by their teachers did not themselves necessarily feel confident about the languages skills they were acquiring. The researchers took the view that this lack of confidence among competent students was the most serious consequence of the climate of negativity. When the students were invited to reflect back on the course they had taken, leading to Standard Grade in Fourth Year, they tended to dislike the ‘self-centred curriculum’ (too much repetitious ‘personalisation’?), the ‘excessive emphasis on grammar and vocabulary’ and the ‘lack of intellectual challenge’. It was interesting that these high-attaining students had found French to be ‘difficult’ but ‘not intellectually challenging’!

MLPS

By the early 1990s there was a ‘new show in town’ in the form of a second wave of MLPS. It has featured strongly in the policies and the activity of both the European Commission and the Council of Europe.

During the 1990s, Scotland was the UK's front-runner with its nati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction to the series
• Introduction
• Part I Overview
• Part II Issues in the classroom
• Part III Educational debates
• References
• Index