A study of 1,300 Year 8 pupils has revealed that parents’ beliefs are a bigger influence on children’s views of themselves as language learners than are teacher opinions.
Parents are twice as likely as teachers to influence pupils’ success in modern foreign languages (MFL), according to research by the University of Cambridge published today.
The Cambridge researchers say their findings show that measures to reverse the national decline in language learning at GCSE and A level should target families rather than just children.
Professor Linda Fisher, from the university’s Faculty of Education, said: “Students’ personal commitment to languages is determined by their experiences, their beliefs and their emotional response to speaking or using them. Slightly surprisingly, the people who feed into that most appear to be their parents.”
“This can be a positive or negative influence, depending on the parents’ own views. Its importance underlines the fact that if we want more young people to learn languages, we need to pay attention to wider social and cultural attitudes to languages beyond the classroom. Waning interest in these subjects is a public communication challenge; it’s not just about what happens in schools.”
The researchers also say that new government measures designed to improve pupil uptake and motivation in MFL “focus narrowly on so-called ‘linguistic building blocks’”, which require, for example, students to learn 1,700 common words in the target language.
But they say pupils need “a broader-minded approach”, and to understand what languages mean to them through, for example, hearing and using them in their communities or while travelling abroad.
Professor Fisher added: “Simply drilling verb forms into them will only persuade a swathe of the school population that these subjects are not for them. That is especially likely if their parents don’t value languages either.”
In the research, pupils were asked to state how strongly they agreed or disagreed with various statements, such as “learning other languages is pointless because everyone speaks English”, and “my parents think that it’s cool to be able to speak other languages”.
They were also asked about their own experience with languages and how multilingual they considered themselves to be.
The study found evidence that students who self-identify as multilingual perform better across the school curriculum, including in non-language subjects.
It found that parents’ beliefs about languages had almost twice as much influence on pupils as did the opinions of their teachers.
