The learning and teaching of foreign languages in various parts of the world is among the deemed important activities young students should engage themselves with. Since learning foreign languages has been proven time and again to be very useful for a wide array of purposes. We have written another article related with this, based on intercultural business interaction and  learning foreign languages which helps understanding more cultures and developing businesses that rely on the importance of languages.

More and more countries in the world are promoting the learning and teaching of foreign languages. In the United Kingdom however, new statistics show that there is a fall in the number of trainee teachers specializing in languages. There is a shortage of trainee modern foreign language teachers in the UK and it is holding back the government drive to make certain that all children start learning a foreign language from the age of seven.

The new figures show that there is a drop in the number of trainee primary school teachers that specialize in languages from 710 to 560 in just two years. Sir Jim Rose, the former chief schools inspector heads a government inquiry that calls for the subject of languages to be introduced in the students’ timetable in 2011.

The UK government may be looking forward to improving the curriculum for modern foreign languages but in reality, things are going in the wrong direction since there is a decline in the number of teachers and language specialists.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ briefing note reveals that primary schools have to resort to a range of measures to ensure that they can teach languages. This also includes bringing in parents with language skills to teach and using the existing staff that might have a dash of knowledge of a foreign language.

The languages from which a school might choose which vary from the usual European staple of German, Spanish, and French to the likes of Urdu and Japanese, often depend on which ones the existing staff can speak. The results make it difficult to provide continuity between primary and secondary schooling of foreign languages. It was revealed that most of the primary school curriculum is delivered orally rather than through written work.

Sir Jim Rose’s report recommends that only one or two foreign languages should be taught and that these should fit in with what is offered by local secondary schools. Most primary schools would prefer to offer several languages even though they are not taught with much depth on the grounds that it would increase the students’ interest for the subject.

A research has shown results that there is a class divide in schools which offers languages as a GCSE option with independent and selective state schools still likely to offer languages to all pupils but some comprehensive in disadvantaged areas are dropping the subjects in general. A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said the language teacher figures had to be taken in context, adding the fact that there were only fifty vacancies for secondary languages in January. He said that “There’s no point in recruiting the same numbers of language teachers if there are no jobs for them to fill, if retention rates are good and if the secondary population is falling.”

What will become of the future of foreign language teaching in the UK if there is a steady decline of language teachers? What do you think the government must do to solve this issue?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Language News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.