The Independent reports today that the ambassadors to the UK from Germany, Italy and Spain have called on the UK to improve language skills in order to boost pan-European competitiveness. The French ambassador also lent his support to their comments.
The news came out over the weekend that the forthcoming education green paper will drop compulsory languages at age 14, but may instead re-introduce language learning into primary schools, before age of 11 when they are begun at present. In recent years the number of young people taking language A-levels has fallen.
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The language learning that I did at school was appalling, taught in English Grammar method, and old fashioned then. Language teachers have a lot to learn, and as most of them are not native speakers of the languages that they teach it’s hardly surprising that they can’t even get the accent right. I learnt resonable Spanish in 6 months of living in Spain, and fluency in 3 years. I’d never teach Spanish though! But I can work in Spanish. And we should be promoting languages for this reason, and starting kids at six the way they do in Europe and making a language compulsory at A level, otherwise people eventually won’t want us to speak to them as they’ll all be speaking International English which won’t be anything like the language we speak.