UK: ¿ Puede leer este titular? Si n o, esta es la razón...

[Francis Hult]

The Observer

 

¿ Puede leer este titular? Si no, esta es la razón...*

 

*The headline says: Can you read this headline? If not, here is the reason... This week thousands of British schoolchildren will head off on foreign holidays - but, sadly, many won't be able to speak a word to the locals. Fewer and fewer pupils are studying foreign languages, and language teaching in our schools is in a dire state

 

The teenagers lying in the sunshine on Richmond Green are glad that school has ended and that the summer stretches before them. All but one will be travelling abroad with their families: three to France, two to Spain and the rest to a range of holiday destinations.

 

They live in an affluent, cosmopolitan, outer London borough renowned for its long-standing policy of teaching French in primary school, so it's natural to expect that this group of nine 15-year-olds will be taking at least one modern foreign language for GCSE. But they are not. Only two are taking French and one Spanish.

Ask them why and you hear the same expressions here as in the rest of the country - languages are 'hard', 'boring', 'confusing', 'embarrassing' and they can't wait to give them up. 

 

It is six years since the government announced that it would change the law to make the study of a modern foreign language no longer compulsory for 14- to 16-year-olds in England and the subjects are in freefall. Entries for GCSE French have dropped from 315,071 in England in 2002 to 197,774 last year. German plummeted from 122,053 to 77,671 over the same period. Spanish stayed more steady rising slightly in 2003 to 59,588 and then slipping back last year to 59,121.

 

Full story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/03/languages.schools1

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