Perché gli alunni abbandonano le lingue in centinaia di migliaia?
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/pupils-abandoning-languages-schools-rkqdv5z7c
di 457655676
Perché gli alunni abbandonano le lingue in centinaia di migliaia?
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/pupils-abandoning-languages-schools-rkqdv5z7c
di 457655676
17 commenti
Through Brexit we made it much much harder for young people to live and work in Europe.
At lot of them are probably wondering what the point of learning German is, when it’s going to be a huge uphill battle for them to ever get sponsored for a job in Germany.
There’s also no more Erasmus for British students, and machine translation has massively shrunk career prospects in translation.
They already have hearing aids that can translate languages directly into your ear, won’t be long before this technology is in every phone, studying for a language if you know English is a waste of time
Language teaching in this country has always been a joke. We weren’t taught any language until year 7 and then it’s only 2 hours a week. Far too little far too late.
If we cared about teaching children languages we’d start them on it from year 1 with a significant amount of time dedicated to it.
I would have loved to be fluent in a language. But even with a A level in Spanish I was conversationally terrible.
Maybe they think with future economy, they might never be able to travel.
Honestly… what’s the point?
I’ve taken up learning another language as an adult. It’s not French, Spanish or German though, and those were the only options I had at secondary school. I had absolutely no interest in learning them and still don’t.
It’s a waste of time when our first language is English. We don’t need to learn other people’s languages to do business, because they learn ours. Spend that extra time teaching programming or something else useful, and let those that want to learn a language learn outside of school
Fear not, humans. It’s the future.
The future is babel fish.
Trying to convince English speakers to learn a foreign language is always uphill battle, the benefits are just much smaller than for basically any other group on earth.
I think language education could do with an overhaul. I studied German for 3 years and French for 5 in high school, didn’t really retain anything. It’s the same story for everyone I know.
At A-level it is also considerably more difficult to get top grades if you are not a native speaker – because you are up against many who are. At a time when so many top universities want to grades across the board, that means it represents a risk you don’t have to take.
Because language teaching in this country has always been shit. I can remember the German exchange visit when I was at school in the 90s. All the German kids were fluent in English, while we were still learning how o ask to go to the bank, the railway station or the Town Hall. From textbooks that still referred to East Germany and West Germany.
Because its taught at a primary level by people that cannot speak other languages, its taught for two hours a week in secondary by people that can speak other languages but you only learn enough to be able to ask where things are, some basic verbs and phrases.
Then you go to another country and (depending where you go) they’ll tend to reply in English if you have an attempt at their language. English is the lingua franca of the majority of the world who have English languages products/shows/songs shoved into their face 24/7.
Its also easy from what I understand to get by comparatively with functional English due to the lack of genderised nouns. People might use the wrong word or wrong pronunciation of something but the sentence still makes sense and you’ll usually know what someone means.
Likely the quality of instruction is poor and limited real world application for most people post Brexit.
If the teaching quality is anything like when I was in school, you’ll have better chances of holding a conversation if you listened to the green owl.
If I could have dropped French I would have. I do get that learning a language can be incredibly beneficial but I feel like I hit my limit after a year of it and the pace and content was just too much. Some kids don’t have an aptitude for foreign languages and French isn’t an easy language to learn.
What’s weird is that as an adult I’ve learned Mandarin at my own pace and I found it much easier.
Primary school we had some French classes in year 3/4 after that nothing. Secondary school they decided to teach us German and we didn’t get a choice I would have happily continued French or chose japanese/Spanish/Arabic languages I wanted to learn but didn’t get that option
The trouble with being English is that there’s no point learning any other language. I’ve lived in France, Germany and the US and never really struggled. I mostly knew German.
I pity those people in Wales and Scotland learning the dead Welsh language and ancient Scottish because that’s just stupid.
Whilst I gather that there’s evidence that learning a language is useful for the brain, there’s just no point.
Even after living there I can barely speak French or German now.
Because there’s no relevance. Why study a language at school that you won’t get to use? Unless your family travel often (which mine didnt). I poured every ounce of energy into STEM to get into my career
That being said, as an adult I’m learning other languages – as I travel more and it’s quite useful. Plus keeps the brain engaged