Some news has no point at all. This is one. “Britain risks becoming a monolingual society”, wrote the Telegraph on February 4th, and the BBC carried the news further, speaking of the call by Headteachers to make GCSE and A-level exams even easier so that pupils take up more languages.
The news is useless, and so is its treatment by headteachers, by politicians and the media. Why? Because they treat the symptom, not the core of the disease.
The problem with England in particular, Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world in general, is much deeper rooted. The problem is called The Native Speaker Fallacy.
The people who teach our children Modern Languages are almost exclusively now native speakers.
If you follow the climbing curve of employment of native speakers in private and state UK schools over the past twenty years, you will see the opposite tendency to the curve of foreign language uptake in students.
An immediate disclaimer: I am a foreigner, a native speaker and a French teacher. I am not attacking native speaker teachers: for all their (more than occasional) lack of specific linguistic qualifications in their mother tongue, they are hard-working people who apply in British schools the much better structured principles of basic language teaching from their own countries.
The problem is that their British students, seeing that their language teachers are preferentially foreign, almost automatically exclude further language studies for a possible teaching career. How can they compete with the native speakers once they’re out of university? Moreover, currently, especially in private schools, their own (fee paying) parents insist at every Parents’ Evening that the French teacher is a French national, the Spanish teacher is a Spanish national etc.
What happens in reality – and it all started in the private sector first – is that native speakers, regardless of their university degree (Psychology, German, Science, you name it) are preferred when a school advertises a post in the Modern Languages Department. The young Europeans, often arriving in London as au-pairs or waiters/waitresses, are cheaper to the shredded school budget! And, of course, they sound authentic. Modern Language teaching and the drive towards “communicative methods” are not about what we know, but about the way we sound.
The English candidates, however well qualified, don’t stand a chance, unless they come from Oxford or Cambridge.
This is the unwritten, the untold truth.
It didn’t always use to be like that. About twenty years ago native speakers were employed mainly as Assistantes – teaching assistants to qualified teaching linguists.
Rather like scientists whose nationality is immaterial, these linguists developed a passion for the subject: French phonetics, German expressionist poetry, Italian dialect translation… It used to be just wonderfully normal for an Englishman to become passionate for the Russian language and start a course at university, fired by Dr Zhivago.
No more. With the advent of the native speaker, the depth of linguistics, literature and cultural studies of all languages taught in Britain has shrunk.
The native speakers admit to rarely liking or knowing their own country’s literature. They don’t know how language and thought function, how to open for their students the semantic field of a word or to explain the moods in grammar. They don’t know how to follow down to the Latin roots a word that can excite a young audience.
Up until the early 2000s, the influence of Europe and European thought was strong enough in England to create huge hubs of foreign language research. Up until 15 years ago Sheffield University had an amazing School of Slavonic Studies.
The best Bulgarian language specialists in Europe, Professor Michael Holman from the Slavonic Languages Department in Leeds University, spoke like a Bulgarian, but, just as the department that he represented, is no more amongst us.
No more. Now even in Oxford University the post-graduate research degrees in applied linguistics and comparative literature are being offered almost exclusively to… native speakers. Even Oxford and Cambridge discriminate against the British, accepting their PhDs only in cultural studies.
So, why would youngsters take up languages for GCSE, A-level or even university? It’s a waste of time. The future jobs available to a Languages undergraduate, according to the Modern Languages Department at King’s College London, are:
- Civil servants
- Teachers of English as Additional Language
- Administrative employees (PAs or Secretaries) in high-profile businesses, including finance
- Tour guides and museum clerks
At least King’s College London does not lie. No language teaching jobs for Language undergrads. Not even an opportunity in translation and interpreting.
After leaving the EU, interpreting jobs in the UK are even fewer than before, and very badly paid.
According to a survey from 2016, the British read only 6% translated literature, as opposed to 20% in France and 30% in Germany.
French children (aged 11-15) read in translation, as part of their curriculum, the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Goethe, Cervantes and Dickens, with the occasional Shakespeare thrown in.
The British children think that The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an original creation by Walt Disney.
There is no language without culture. There is no culture without language.
Without foreign languages, with the merciless invasion of mashed-up texting, chat and instant messaging, English is already becoming weaker and more superficial.
The English children who are not interested in languages become even less interested in preserving their own.
The first step to reversing this is to give them a chance to study foreign languages and employ them to teach them. The English teacher who teaches French to English children will know better than anyone how to overcome the challenges of the foreign grammar and culture.
Reignite all English passions for foreign cultures by opening language teaching to English-born qualified linguists.
Native-speaker language teaching focuses on the technicalities of language, the way it sounds and moves grammatically. A language is primarily learned with affection. We must reignite the passion for languages before it’s too late.
This comes from a native speaker AND a qualified linguist who is overseeing the death of languages as well as the death of good English in England.
6 February 2021
Dora Court 