Podcast on YouTube: YouTube Link
Podcast on Spotify: Spotify Link
Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
The British Council’s Language Trends study for 2023
Let’s start with the Infographic about what pupils think of language learning in the UK. Should be interesting, right? I’m not going to cover everything, so I’ll leave a link to the page where you can download this for yourself, if you want.
The first thing to note is that these are kids at the end of their first year of secondary school, which I’m assuming, for many, will be their first experience of learning a language.
So, the most learnt language in England is French at 79% of respondents. This doesn’t surprise me. It was French when I was a kid. In fact, French was obligatory, other languages came later. France is the closest country to us physically, the place where most people are likely to first come into contact with another language and the place that’s most convenient for any language exchanges, if that kind of thing still happens.
Okay, maybe Ireland is the country closest to us, but I’m pretty sure most schools wouldn’t offer Irish as an option
Next up is Spanish at 49%. Again, no surprise as Spanish is a very widely used language in the world. However, the most popular second language at my school was German, as in the language people wanted to do, I don’t know about number of students catered for. German here stands at only 18%. Latin was big at my school, a former grammar school, but is now only 3%. Again, there may not have been a huge number of students taking it up, but it was seen as a good language to learn. And poor old Italian, which I don’t think we even had available, comes in at a paltry 0.4%. Even Welsh is higher than that at 8%, and, yes, there’s Irish, and that’s higher too, but, of course, Welsh will be commonly offered in the individual countries, beacause, of course, Northern Ireland is part of the UK.
Next, 46% of pupils love or like learning a language. That’s good, but there’s a whole chunk in the middle of 38% who don’t mind. I wonder if that means that they’d rather be doing something else. However, only 16% don’t like or hate learning languages, so that has to be a plus. Way more pupils are okay with it than aren’t. I guess that means they find it potentially a useful thing to know. Let’s see.
Ah, only 20% definitely want to do languages for their exams. That’s a little sad. That’s across all languages. So, if they’re doing two, that means two languages they don’t want to continue with. Can you even do two languages these days? We had to, which is how I ended up with French and Spanish. But we didn’t have to do them for exams. AT least, I don’t think we did. Anyway, some of the reasons for this are that they find it boring/don’t enjoy it, it’s too difficult or they think that they don’t need to learn it. A lot of those are reasons adults give for not learning languges, too, so it’s not really surprising. Languages are hard. But a big factor will be that a whopping 86% don’t think they will use languages in their future careers and, I have to agree, they’re probably right, with English widely being used as the language of business. What need is there for companies to spend more to get people who know languages when they can talk in English? I did a quick search on Indeed, the jobs website, for French speaking jobs and there were a few, but they didn’t look like entry level jobs to me and a lot were for teaching.
Only 9% of pupils felt they could speak a language well. Is that after just one year? If so, that’s hardly surprising, to be honest. I wouldn’t have felt I was anywhere like speaking a language well after that length of time. After one year you wouldn’t even have learnt all the basic grammar, I’m sure, if it’s anything like the way we were taught. I don’t remember how many lessons we had a week, but it wasn’t many. Maybe, two, possibly three hours.
So, there’s also a more general report on language learning. Let’s look at some points from that to give this a little more context.
I see that the National Curriculum, which doesn’t apply to Acadamies, which many schools are, requires study of an ancient or modern foreign language from the age of 7-11. That’s definitely different to when I was a kid. So, it’s perfectly possible that those mentioned on the pupils infographic had been studying for a lot longer than one year, although I imagine languages at primary school are a lot less intense.
Study of a modern foreign language is required from 11-14 but there’s no requirement to study languages from 14-16. That would be when studying for final exams.
The most common languages are again French and Spanish in primary schools. It is also apparent that in secondary schools, the most popular languages are definitely related to what is offered at different schools. German is offered in less than half the state schools schools participating, but indpendent schools offer it in over 75% of schools. Most common number of hours spent on languages in those first three years of secondary school is 1-2, even in independent schools, so that’s not much, but is obviously a little higher for those who end up taking exams.
This is interesting, but there’s nothing particularly surprising to me about it. I wonder how different these figures and languages would be for other European countries. I might try looking into that for a future podcast.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, adiós, hwyl and bye for now.