A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Languages
❘
325
weaknesses. A clear understanding of the school context is important for all HE teachers.
Over recent decades the secondary school system in England has experienced an
unprecedented rate of change, for example:
• experimentation with a variety of school types, including privately owned and run
academies and specialist colleges such as language colleges focusing on an international
curriculum;
• new examinations to address a wider range of ability and purpose, including at
16 the GCSE vocational examinations such as the Certificate in Business Language
Competence and Applied Language GCSEs, the AS and A2 to encourage study
of a wider range of subjects at 16-plus, and the current piloting of new
Diplomas to provide a vocational route for 40 per cent of 14- to 19-year-olds of all
abilities;
• regulation of content and teaching style through National Curriculum orders and a
range of national ‘strategies’ such as the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)
Framework (see below);
• swings in the status of MFL as a compulsory or optional subject from 14 to 16; the
current National Languages Strategy aims for compulsory language learning from 7
to 14 from 2010;
• major investment throughout the compulsory education sector in the application of
C&IT to teaching and learning, including a mass programme of teacher training and
the introduction of C&IT Standards to be met by new trainee teachers; this has
implications for student expectations in HE;
• a change in government emphasis from European languages for social cohesion to a
focus on the economic needs of the country, for example by encouraging Japanese or
Chinese.
These are both causes and symptoms of a drive to ensure that compulsory education
meets the vocational and leisure needs of the country; the priority in compulsory education
is to meet the needs of the majority rather than prepare a small élite for further
academic study. This has consequences for HE colleagues who need to acknowledge the
change in skills of incoming students and adapt their courses to address new needs.
A major factor in making language learning more relevant and more widely accessible
was the introduction of a topic-based GCSE examination at 16. Although this has often
been criticised for its uninspiring content and for shifting the balance too far from
accuracy to fluency and improving neither, HE teachers should not underestimate its
contribution to increased access; without it, numbers in HE might be lower still.
Dissatisfaction throughout the system has led to changes which re-emphasise the
development of grammatical knowledge and accuracy. Nevertheless, a topic-based
syllabus, combined with minimal teaching time and high-stakes league tables, inevitably
leads to a focus on ‘topic coverage’ rather than on language learning skills.
There have been attempts to lessen the washback effect of the GCSE examination by
ensuring that firm foundations for language learning are set during Key Stage 3 (11–14).