Response to Ed Balls' unveiling of
the Government's 10-year plan to create a "world-class" education
for every child in England.
To a company devoted to teaching and learning languages, the
initiative to re-introduce language learning at the primary level
was indeed welcome news.
This is absolutely the right time to open up the neural pathways
to the possibility of the kind of 'parallel thought' that language
learning requires. What's more, it appears to me that once that
new relationship to language is formed, the propensity to learn
more languages is further enhanced.
The 11-year-old daughter to friends of ours whose father is
German and the mother French, was recently charged with occupying
our English 5 year old. Maria, the 11-year-old had been studying
English in school for just one year, but was nevertheless able
to communicate most convincingly with her, mobilising every word
of a language she had scarcely been exposed to, to chatter away
all day. It was a pleasure to witness, and definitely the result
of this ability to switch between languages.
Recruiting adequately trained Primary School teachers with
foreign languages skills But will there be sufficient numbers
of adequately trained language teachers at the primary level,
given that at that level, teachers are still teaching across disciplines?
In other countries, where speaking another language is second
nature and something the majority of the population succeeds in
doing, the ability of schools overseas to recruit primary school
teachers with language skills should be fairly high. In marked
contrast, the UK's newly qualifying teaching stock will soon be
of the generation where language learning was made non-compulsory
in schools. This reduces the teachers available at a time when
the need for them will be at its greatest.
One solution will be to bring in specialist, possibly peripatetic
language teachers. But this is costly to schools, and is more
generally in use for extra-curricular activities than for compulsory
components of the national curriculum.
How much does a teacher need to know? At Primary, with
the odd bilingual exception, the level of language knowledge required
by staff might seem fairly low, and as much of the languages learning
might well be passing through games and songs, the teaching of
language indeed be open to a larger proportion of the teaching
staff than at the secondary level. Nevertheless, teachers will
need to feel that they are confident and competent to teach languages,
as the confidence (or lack of it) that they pass on to their pupils
will be as big a factor as the language itself.
Another solution might be for schools to start recruiting foreign
nationals who also possess a PGCE or ability to teach at the Primary
level in the reduced capacity of classroom assistant. This will
give schools more flexibility and at less cost. Failing that,
there is still time to train up existing staff members, though,
again, for the school they will have to have absolute confidence
in the teacher's longevity in that particular school before commencing
a 1-2 year foreign language training plan. And will there be any
extra local authority budget available for such training?
The Europe-funded Comenius programme offers teachers the opportunity
to study a European language, with the emphasis being placed on
improving the participant's abilities to teach that language.
More information is available on these programmes from Cactus
TEFL (info@cactustefl.com)
Richard Bradford
Posted 11 December 2007 |
