LANGUAGES
Schools at a loss for words Modern language uptake has been dwindling for years. But why is this, and what can our educational establishments do to articulate the value of looking beyond our mother tongue?
ou often hear people talking about how foreign languages are taught in the UK, complaining
encouraging – cultural and linguistic diversity is one of the many things that makes our area wonderful. Yet, it’s not reflected in the numbers of students motivated to learn foreign languages. Research shows that students learning a foreign language perform better than those who aren’t. It can boost performance in other academic subjects as well as improving their cognitive skills. The question is: why aren’t students learning second languages? The truth is that the standard of modern language teaching isn’t the same across all schools, with some having access to fewer learning resources than others. Reports suggest that children still have a passion for
that despite learning French for years, they can’t hold a conversation as an adult. Recently, there has been a vast decline in secondary school pupils from year 9 upwards continuing to study languages. Once they were dropped from the core curriculum in 2004, the numbers taking German and French GCSE plummeted by over half from 1996 to 2021. Cambridgeshire is not a county of monoglots, by any means. Actually, our inhabitants speak a total of 88 different primary languages between them. This is a statistic we should be celebrating and
38 SPRING/SUMMER 2024
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