British Council Primary Roundtable for MFL

The issues

Some of the issues to be discussed are detailed below. I will be attending to continue lobbying for a wider range of languages to be offered and for consideration to be made of working with supplementary schools on the provision of language taster session or even full language tuition programmes. I will also be reminding people of the wonderful work of the HoLA Project in Sheffield. Please get in touch with comments, suggestions, opinon that you think I should be feeding in. 

Pascale

Transition

Despite areas of country where there is systematisation of schemes of work, the teaching of joint modules, the use of secondary pupils as ‘ambassadors’, taster days, festivals and project work etc, disparities in perceptions remain between the achievement levels that primary teachers feel have been reached and those understood by secondary colleagues.

There is a particular challenge (common to Anglophone education systems) in achieving continuity whilst at the same time offering a diverse range of languages and choice to pupils.  This means that pupils might not be able to continue the language they have started at primary school or will need to start again from the beginning. The APPG has heard evidence about the Hackney model for Spanish, which has overcome this issue. Other approaches to dealing with  this issue include the “Discovering language” project and other “Knowledge about language” approaches which integrate principles of linguistics to the learning 

 EAL

Many teachers in Language Trends reports raise issues relating to pupils with EAL. Their comments highlight the difference between those who arrive in school with competence in another language in addition to English, and newly arrived children from other countries who still have very little English. Respondents reporting on the former say that the experience of learning a new language for pupils who already have another language and English is very positive and they excel, whereas for the latter group, the teaching of a new language as well as English can be distracting.

Patchy provision (time, continuity, regularity, not prioritised)

Many primary schools are not able to provide regular, consistent, high quality language teaching which will ensure that pupils joining secondary schools in Year 7 are proficient enough in another language to enable secondary teachers to build on four solid years of structured language teaching.

Language Trends 2018 reports “Around 80% of schools allocate on average between 30 minutes and up to one hour per week for language learning, although comments indicate that this is often irregular or eroded by other priorities” In comparison to others, English-speaking countries dedicate the least amount of time to foreign language learning and this is associated with low expectations about standards of achievement.