Many years ago, I was on a train rumbling through the French countryside when I got a language lesson that I’d never forget.

I had been studying French for eight years - six at school and two at university - but had never actually spoken the language in France. I’d been there only once, for a school trip while in S2, when everyone was far more interested in the fake Ray-Bans outside the Pompidou Centre than practising their linguistic skills. In any case, the most sophisticated sentence I could have mustered under duress would have been something like “Je n’ai pas un cochon d’Inde” (guinea pigs were inexplicably ubiquitous in our French textbooks in 1989).

Now, six years later, I saw myself as a young man of the world about to immerse himself in all things Gallic, as I made a marathon rail and sea journey from Aberdeen to Auvergne to work as an English language assistant in a secondary school.

I was feeling peckish and sidled up to the buffet car. I met the slightly disdainful look of the bow-tied young man behind the counter with a cheery “Bonjour!” and saw that peanuts were on offer. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the French word, so I took my crumpled pocket Collins dictionary out.

The server exhaled peevishly as I flicked through to “P” while a couple more people joined the queue, and there it was: “Je voudrais un paquet de ca-ca-hoo-ets, s’il vous plaît?” I tentatively offered.

“Quoi?” came the peremptory response. The first person I had ever spoken French to in France was not of a mind to hold my hand. I tried again: he furrowed his brow and upturned his hands in contempt at my increasingly frantic attempts to make myself understood. The queue was getting longer, beads of sweat were rolling down my forehead and my attempts simply to order a snack were descending into gibberish.

Finally, I had to admit defeat - and resort to pointing. The server traced his hand over the shelves until I finally nodded. He handed the peanuts over with one last eye roll as I shuffled back to my carriage and contemplated that, after eight years of learning French, I couldn’t even order a bag of peanuts.

There is surely something wrong with any approach to learning languages that doesn’t put heavy emphasis on oral communication, yet how much has changed since my humiliation a quarter of a century ago?

There was much consternation when Tes Scotland reported last week that the Scottish Qualifications Authority would not be assessing students’ ability to speak any language they are learning at Advanced Higher this year. The likes of Tony Finn - a former chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland, who started his career as a modern languages teacher - described it as a “backward step”, since speaking was “fundamental to comprehension and to fluency”. He recognised that the move was a “pragmatic adjustment” to Covid, but insisted that it sent out the “wrong signal”.

Ironically, we are at the end of Languages Week Scotland, in an era when it feels more important than ever to learn languages, given fraught international relations and the retreat into social media echo chambers. Yet our record of learning languages is pitiful - 2018 data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that the UK was among the worst of 79 countries for learning languages.

We should be careful, then, of any move that could make that situation worse. History tells us that, in times of upheaval, many apparently temporary changes are never fully or even partially reversed. Covid is making huge demands on everyone, but care must be taken that what is currently expedient does not become a permanent reconfiguration of learning for the worse.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 5 February 2021 issue under the headline “Covid changes that seem peanuts can have lasting consequences”