The current Language Trends Survey, carried out by Teresa Tinsley and Kate Board for the British Council and CFBT is here. A lot of very encouraging findings - eg 30% of primary schools responding had a graduate in the language they were teaching, and over 80% are still teaching a language - but still the very serious problem at A level, where languages not only have tiny entries, but the lowest proportions of pupils continuing from AS. Ebacc continues to have a positive effect. Well worth reading.
I have just started teaching Stephen, a Y10 pupil, via phone and skype, originally for spelling and possible dyslexia (now quite rightly discounted by the school) and now for French at which he was “not doing very well”. He has a controlled assessment just after Easter, and I looked at his first draft. It was full of errors and misconceptions that he is quite capable of fixing with the right teaching, but which, to me, should never have occurred. He does not know how to put a simple sentence together with an accurate verb ending, has been taught to say “je déteste” instead of je n’aime pas – which means he can’t construct negatives with other verbs – doesn’t understand accents, and uses English approximations to the sounds of French when he is stuck for a spelling. The combination of poor teaching of English spelling – see Crystal’s Spell it Out for the full story of English spelling – and lack of attention to detail in written work, first suggested by Eric Hawkins as a way of making languages accessible to lower-attainers – has left him seriously underperforming, frustrated and unhappy. I can fix this pupil’s French, as I’ve fixed the French of many others on an individual basis since my first case in the seventies.
The reason I’m angry is that he has precisely the same problems as my pupil from Pimlico in 1977, and for precisely the same reasons. Our teaching methods, and the assumptions of Eric Hawkins, are not working and need to be changed. The effects of this on the pupils are seen in the survey. The NC should provide a new start, but it won’t if people simply carry on as before.