Summer 2013 - The Independent Schools' Modern Language ...

ine cultural awareness only occasionally bubbles up in the many lessons that
I have observed across several schools, and even then it is usually more by
accident than by design. So I am not yet convinced on that score either.
Some GCSE pupils will have started French aged 3, and 13 years later still
don’t really know what to be French really means. That may admittedly be an
unreasonable target, but if it is unreasonable, we can’t really justify teaching
our subject on those grounds.
Here is a radical thought – perhaps we teach MFLs because we want the pupils
to be able to speak another language. Well, for sure. That’s what everyone
wants to do, isn’t it? How many adults have we met over the years who
express a regret that they can’t speak another tongue? It is a pity, therefore,
that we have to spend so long training our GCSE pupils to write an article
about what they do for the environment, or trying to unpick a complicated
text about unicycle hockey (anyone else seen that one in an iGCSE paper? I
mean, come on...) So I don’t really feel that I am teaching pupils to speak -
not properly or in a meaningful or useful way, anyway. They might know
their 1 minute oral presentation absolutely perfectly…but what use is that,
and where is the fun or purpose in it?
Hmmm. I’m starting to run out of ideas now. Oh yes – what about the learning
of a foreign language being a good academic discipline? It is, isn’t it? I
mean, it trains you to understand grammar, words, etymology…it encourages
you to read, to think critically, to reflect….yes, but again, how many of us
could claim to be encouraging these virtues in our junior school lessons on a
regular basis, and incorporating them in our teaching? I daresay that most of
us would admit to underselling them, again because of other pressures.
Well, I’ve racked my overtired brains enough. I am sure that there are other
great reasons for learning an MFL, but do you see what I mean? We’ve rather
lost our way, haven’t we? We may be using new textbooks, with interactive
whiteboards, digital language labs and all sorts of other gizmos, but I don’t
think that the industry actually knows what it is doing anymore. MFL teachers
all know the inherent value of what we’re doing, and how crucial it is, but
we’re not packaging it in a way that is helpful, relevant or attractive for adolescents,
and we’re not at all sure what’s wrong and what to do about it.
Which brings me back to stories. Back in 2010, The Times ran an interesting
article entitled “Why learn French?” – a good question – and I wrote a letter
to the Editor to try to answer this. My letter was published, along with several
other letters, including one from Dr Robert Vanderplank, the Director of
the Oxford University Language Centre. I contacted him, and he was kind
enough to share several thoughts with me, and indeed an article that he had
written in the TES magazine in August 2012. The main drive of what he says
is this: pupils would be keen to learn an MFL provided that the material keeps
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