Modern Foreign Languages in the Primary School

The What, Why and How of Early MFL Teaching

Keith Sharpe, Keith (Professor of Education Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136609053
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An overview of the place of modern languages in the primary school in the 21st century. It is written for anyone with an active role in teaching languages in schools today, either at primary or secondary levels. It discusses the practical issues involved in teaching MFL to primary students.

Part 1

The ‘Why’ Issues

1

More Phoenix than Dodo Now

Lack of Primary MFL Teaching in England

Delivering the annual Romanes lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in December 1999, Tony Blair (who became UK prime minister in 1997) emphasized the importance of children learning a modern language at a young age:

English may be the new lingua franca, a competitive advantage for us as a nation, not least in education. But the competitive advantage for each of us as individuals is the capacity to make our way as freely as possible through the new Europe and the wider world. Everyone knows that with languages the earlier you start, the easier they are. The National Curriculum rightly makes a modern language compulsory from the beginning of secondary school. But many children gain a valuable head start earlier. Some primary schools already do excellent work in this area, and language teaching from the age of seven or eight is almost universal in independent schools, once competence in the basics has been achieved. As all schools move towards universal competence in literacy and numeracy, the scope for more language teaching in the later primary years is something we are seriously considering.

It is quite a sobering thought that the 19th and 20th centuries passed almost entirely without anything firm about the teaching of modern foreign languages in English primary schools being said by any British prime minister or secretary of state for education. Then in the final month of the second millennium, at the eleventh hour so to speak, the British government announces that it is ‘seriously considering’ the issue. Virtually alone amongst developed countries in general, and the European nations in particular, the English education system which was built up over centuries has never formally required its primary-age children to learn a foreign language. Furthermore, the fact that Mr Blair’s government declared itself to be ‘seriously considering’ primary MFL is not per se necessarily cause for great optimism. Earlier in the 20th century a previous government spoke in similar terms, but eventually it all came to nought.

Although modern languages, particularly French, had long been thought a suitable subject for inclusion in the curricula of independent fee charging ‘preparatory’ schools, it was not until the 1960s that the possibility of offering a modern language in state primary schools was contemplated in government circles. In 1963 the then minister of education, Sir Edward Boyle, gave government support to a ‘pilot scheme to test the feasibility of starting French from the age of eight’ which was to receive funding from the Nuffield Foundation to the tune of £100,000 (approximately £2 million now). This was a period of relative prosperity after the austerity of the immediate postwar period. The then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had just told the nation that people had ‘never had it so good’. It was also a period in which Britain was finding a new post-imperial role in the world. The Federation of British Industry supported the initiative, and there was enthusiasm and interest from many quarters. However, even at this early stage concerns were raised which dogged the project throughout, some of which still have currency in contemporary debates about the place of modern foreign languages in primary education. These included the following

• Which language should be taught?
• How can sufficient appropriately trained and qualified teachers be found?
• What teaching methods are effective in teaching foreign languages?
• Should the government determine what is to be taught?

The pilot scheme lasted barely a decade and was effectively brought to an abrupt end by the unambiguous and fateful conclusion of the evaluation report produced by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in 1974 which declared that:

… it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the weight of evidence has combined with the balance of opinion to tip the scales against a possible expansion of the teaching of French in primary schools. (Burstall et al, 1974: 246)

This dismal outcome was apparently justified by the fact that the evaluators found no substantial differences in later achievement at secondary school between those pupils who had been taught French for three years in the primary school and those who had not. The validity of this finding was challenged by many at the time (see for example: Gamble and Smalley, 1975; Buckby, 1976; Gamble and Hoy, 1977), principally on three fairly damaging grounds. Firstly, the sample of pupils studied dwindled over time to very small numbers whose eventual representativeness of all the children who took part in the project was highly questionable. Secondly, the validity and reliability of some of the test procedures used were dubious. And finally no account was taken of what the secondary schools did, which in most cases was nothing. They did not generally discriminate between incoming pupils who had done primary French and incoming pupils who had not done primary French. Most commonly they simply treated them all the same, which amounted to subjecting all pupils to a ‘start again as if they know nothing’ policy. As a statement on foreign languages in the primary curriculum drafted by Bedfordshire LEA, one of the authorities involved from 1964 onwards in the primary French project, pointed out:

All the early documentation stressed the need for primary/secondary continuity and it was stipulated that pupils entering secondary schools from primary schools in the pilot scheme must be taught separately from beginners in French. Unfortunately this recommendation was never enforced and most children found themselves treated as beginners again at the age of 11. This consideration never formed part of the NFER research into the pilot scheme and the 1974 conclusions about children’s achievement took no account of what had happened five years earlier.

This last criticism is particularly damning. The failure to consider the effect of the attitude of secondary schools is a very serious omission. What must it have been like for primary pupils who had studied French for three years to be treated in their first year of secondary schooling as if they knew nothing? Faced with pupils from pilot and non-pilot feeder primary schools, secondary teachers apparently felt they had no option but to ‘start from scratch’. It is arguable that under these circumstances it is surprising that the pilot scheme pupils did not do worse than the non-pilot pupils. What came to be known as the Burstall Report really gave no indication of how valuable primary French, or any other foreign language, could be where proper provision for progression and continuity into the secondary phase was made. Despite this it was taken as grounds for ending any further government support for primary MFL, and this continued to be the position throughout the rest of the 20th century. Except in areas where there was a particular commitment on the part of the LEA, and in a few schools where there were individual enthusiasts, primary MFL in England and elsewhere in the UK died out.

There are many lessons to learn from the fate of this pilot project in postwar England, but the stark reality remains that after this brief experiment with primary MFL, which actually affected the lives of only a small minority of pupils, the broad status quo was re-established where children are taught French and other languages in private schools but not in the primary schools attended by the mass of the population.

Why should it be that the independent sector takes it as a sine qua non that primary MFL teaching is a good thing, while those responsible for the state system have continued not to do so? This is after all the only curriculum area in which such a discrepancy exists. There is otherwise a fairly clear consensus on what subjects should be included in the primary curriculum for children of junior age. To some extent at least an answer is to be found in the perceived aims and objective espoused by the two sectors. As Alexander (1984) has pointed out, the primary school system inherited many of the traditions and much of the culture of the elementary schools which emerged after the 1870 Education Act. Broadly speaking, the underling philosophy of elementary schooling can be characterized as essentially utilitarian: pupils were to be taught what it was considered useful for them to know and to be able to do. The traditions of the independent preparatory schools were, and to a considerable extent continue to be, associated with the ‘public schools’, and through them with the culture of the older established universities. This culture can be characterized as essentially idealistic: these institutions embodied certain ideals which were set before pupils as models towards which they were expected to aspire. Within the ideal conception of ‘an educated person’ knowledge of classical and modern languages played an important role because of the access they gave to works of great literature which were seen as central to the cultivation of the mind and initiation into Culture with a capital C. Over time, of course, the distinction between the two cultures of schooling has become less marked, with modern primary schools concerned to deliver a much broader curriculum than the old elementary diet of reading,’riting and’rithmetic, and independent schools adopting a more instrumental approach to marketing themselves in terms of promoting pupils’ success in public examinations. Nevertheless it is arguably in the case of foreign language teaching that the major continuing distinction is most clear, perhaps because the usefulness of the subject has never been fully recognized in England; it may be an accomplishment of the educated person but is not yet seen as a positive asset, still less a necessity, as is the case in other countries outside the English-speaking world. The pre-eminence of English as a world language has tended to reinforce the idea that it is not really necessary or useful for native speakers of English to learn to speak another language. The implicit assumption is that since you can count on the natives to speak English there is no pressing need to speak the language of the natives. A few years ago a joke doing the rounds of teachers of modern languages parodied this attitude.

Question: What do you call a person who can speak three languages?
Answer: Trilingual.

Question: What do you call a person who can speak two languages?
Answer: Bilingual.

Question: What do you call a person who can speak only one language?
Answer: English.

In the case of English English, as against other kinds of English such as American English, this a priori invitation to linguistic idleness is strongly reinforced by Britain’s imperial history, and an even deeper attitudinal legacy passing down the ages from generation to generation which might be summarized as an ‘island mentality’. In his insightful study of the English, Paxman (1999) traces the origins of such insularity through the centuries, quoting, for example, Shakespeare, who in the words of John of Gaunt in Richard II speaks of:

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world;

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house.

and George Orwell who noted that:

During the war of 1914–18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. (Quoted in Paxman, 1999: 29)

It is largely this heritage which underpins the apocryphal tales of the English abroad whose attempts to communicate consist mainly of speaking their own language more loudly. It is of course an open question as to whether increasing foreign travel in the latter half of the 20th century really wrought any fundamental change in English attitudes.

The perceived ‘failure’ of the one major national trial in teaching a modern language at the primary stage is itself testimony to the official English view that the only real criterion is ‘usefulness’. The overwhelming emphasis of the NFER evaluation of the Primary French Project reported by Burstall et al (1974) is put on the issue of whether or not teaching French from the age of eight produces measurably better results in examinations taken at the end of secondary schooling. This is an unequivocally utilitarian approach: it is the concern with specific assessible short-term pay-offs at a subsequent stage in schooling rather than an interest in the intrinsic value of the experience itself for young children. It also ignores wider and more diffuse benefits, or those which occur later in life. However, in this regard all educators and policymakers of a utilitarian frame of mind might do well to bear in mind the warning of a schoolmaster writing in the Centenary Magazine of the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys in 1925:

In estimating the worth of any school it is futile to enumerate the successes of one year or of one period by counting up the open scholarships… What is needed is some estimate of the effect on each boy turned out year by year… Only old pupils, looking back on their school-life and seeing the effect on their own minds and characters, and multiplying that effect by thousands, can arrive somewhere near the truth. (Quoted in Hawkins, 1999: 36)

To the view that the worthiness of primary MFL should be judged only in terms of how useful they are can be added the difficulties inherent in actually providing them. It is the case that there just have not been the teachers that would be required to deliver the subject in all primary schools, neither specialist teachers of MFL who could go into primary schools on a peripatetic basis to teach a series of classes, nor the generalist primary practitioners who might include MFL amongst the areas they can offer to include in the curriculum they teach to their own classes. To a large extent this state of affairs has operated as a self-reproducing cycle. Because foreign language learning is not much valued in England generally, levels of linguistic competence are relatively low and specialist teachers of MFL relatively few in number. Before the introduction of the National Curriculum many children dropped MFL as a subject during the years of secondary schooling and large numbers of pupils were not taught the subject at all. Ever since the introduction of the National Curriculum following the Education Reform Act of 1988 (discussed in some detail in the Chapter 2), which of course only provided a MFL entitlement for pupils of secondary school age, there have been chronic shortages of MFL teachers. These have persisted despite reductions in the extent of the original scope of pupils’ MFL entitlement. The same self-reinforcing cycle operates at the level of the primary generalists. Whereas most entrants to primary initial teacher training will have some background from their own secondary schooling of the subjects taught in the primary curriculum, only a small number arrive with a strength in MFL, and although it is possible that they could build on whatever limited base they have during the period of training, there has until recently been what might be termed a ‘silent conspiracy’ between the policy makers who have no desire to resource additional support for MFL and teacher training students who have no desire to learn to teach the subject. Given the enormous pressures the National Curriculum has put on primary teachers since 1988, it is understandable that both parties should think they have enough to do without taking on the headache of yet another subject, and particularly one which is not popular nor much culturally valued.

Thus it was that from 1975 onwards the idea of teaching modern languages in the primary school in England became been pretty much a ‘dead duck’. In most places it became extinct, and like the dodo, had been heard of but was to be seen no more. Unlike the dodo, however, its extinction was not complete and it was not permanent. Indeed it was possible to argue at the beginning of the final decade of the 20th century that the teaching of primary MFL was ‘more phoenix than dodo now’ (Sharpe, 1991).

The Resurrection of Primary MFL Teaching

An educational phoenix is a rare phenomenon. Most innovations which have their day and then die stay dead. The Initial Teaching Alphabet and programmed learning, for example, both blossomed and nourished for a while, then withered and died without hope of resurrection. After the kiss of death administered to primary French by Clare Burstall’s devastating NFER report, rigor mortis gradually set in. Central government funding dried up, and with a few noble, laudable and honourable exceptions local government funding followed suit. With the means of survival withdrawn, primary teaching of modern languages was consigned to the ashes. It was, however, not to remain there. Like the famous bird of mythology which rose from the ashes to fly again, primary MFL, especially primary French, began to make a comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that stage there were beginning to appear some signs of life, giving grounds, if not for sure and certain hope, at least for believing resurrection to be a possibility.

Amongst the first signs of hope was the interim report of the National Curriculum Modern Languages Working Group (NCMLWG), set up alongside other working groups to design what would become the first national statutorily required formal curriculum. Alone amongst the National Curriculum working groups, this group’s members had to deal with a subject which only covered the years 11–16 rather than 5–16 like all the rest. And yet they had to fit in with the same 10-level assessment framework designed to cover 11 years of compulsory schooling which the national Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) had proposed for all subjects. What were they to do? They could have made MFL an exception and used less than 10 levels to reflect the fact that their curriculum prescriptions were to cover only a five-year span. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• The ‘Why' Issues
• More Phoenix than Dodo Now
• Aims and Objectives of Primary MFL Teaching
• The ‘What and When' Issues
• Primary MFL and the National Curriculum
• The Primary Curriculum
• Primary MFL and the European Dimension
• The ‘Who' Issues
• Primary MFL Teachers – The Specialists or Generalists Debate
• Primary MFL Teachers – Education, Training and Professional Development
• The ‘How' Issues
• Primary Pedagogy and MLF Teaching
• Linguistic Progression and Continuity
• Future Issues
• Future Research, Development and Policy Making
• Afterword
• References
• Index