Why are so many students choosing to drop modern foreign languages (MFL) at GCSE and A level?
It’s a problem that Emma Marsden, a professor of foreign language education at the University of York, is determined to analyse, and ultimately, help to resolve.
The work has been ongoing for six years. In 2016, Marsden and a colleague, Dr Rachel Hawkes, contributed towards the MFL Pedagogy Review, which resulted in 15 recommendations to boost the quality of MFL in key stages 3 and 4, and the number of students opting to study languages throughout their time in school.
To ensure that these recommendations were achievable and effective in schools, in 2018, the Department of Education established the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (NCELP), with Marsden and Hawkes as co-directors working with Dr Rowena Kasprowicz and Professor Suzanne Graham from the University of Reading, and Robert Woore from the University of Oxford, along with 18 specialist teachers and a network of 45 schools.
They had the task of ensuring that teachers were supported in understanding and delivering some of the pedagogical recommendations of the review.
Here, Marsden discusses NCELP’s work, and what teachers can to do within their own classrooms to deliver quality MFL lessons and improve uptake.
Tes: Why should we encourage students to study MFL? What skills do languages foster?
Marsden: There are lots of reasons why we should encourage students to study a foreign language. In doing so, students learn to talk to people in a range of different contexts, they gain an insight into different cultures and, ultimately, they become more socially aware.
MFL is also important because we can learn about our own language by learning about other people’s: we become more aware of how our own language systems work and how we express ourselves.
More teaching and learning:
We know that uptake of MFL at GCSE has fallen, but do we know why?
There is a perception in this country that there’s no need for a foreign language because other people will learn English. However, there’s plenty of evidence to say that’s not true: most people in the world don’t speak much or any English.
In addition to this, several research studies show that pupils perceive languages to be difficult and a study by Ofqual found that some languages may be graded more severely than other subjects.
At NCELP, we’ve also found that the way in which the GCSE content is devised means that awarding organisations have had to cover an enormous breadth of content, without clear goal posts about the actual language to be covered. As a result, the vocabulary that has appeared in exam papers has been very unpredictable. Some unpredictability is useful, of course, but too much can be off-putting.
There is a big mismatch between what’s on the exam paper, and what teachers and learners are being asked to teach and learn. If you think that the exam could cover a huge range of vocabulary, and you’re asked to learn that vocabulary, but then it doesn’t turn up in the exam, and words do turn up that aren’t on the word lists, that can be very demotivating for many students. Gradually, the effect is that there’s a perceived difficulty in taking a language exam.
Foreign language anxiety is a well-observed phenomenon, and it is negatively correlated with achievement, in that the more anxiety you have, the chances are that you are going to have lower achievement.
There have been changes to the MFL GCSEs. What are those changes and what will they mean for teachers?
As part of the new content in the MFL GCSEs, awarding organisations have been asked to provide lists of words that will be included in the exams: 85 per cent must be the 2,000 most common words in the language, and 15 per cent can be any words at all. Some words off the list will be used in the reading tests.
The new lists will mean that, on average, over time, there are fewer words to learn, and yet they give better coverage, even of the current GCSEs and A-level exam texts. So, you can see what bang for your buck you get by really knowing these high-frequency words. They aren’t necessarily easy words, as they can have multiple meanings and be irregular - but they are likely to appear in different contexts.
They can act like “keys”, allowing you to work out and learn more words as you go. And they certainly aren’t just a small set of “function” words - you can do a lot with these high-frequency words when combined with some carefully selected less frequent words.
Do you believe those changes can solve the issues around low uptake?
It’s a step in the right direction but there’s more to it. We know that research-informed practice really matters, too.
At NCELP, we looked at international peer-reviewed research and expertise to improve language curriculum design and pedagogy. We believe that if teachers get this right, it can improve pupils’ sense of progression and achievement, and, therefore, their intrinsic motivation.
However, we currently have only between 380 and 450 hours available to teach a language to 11- to 16-year-olds. To put that in context, a four-year-old has about 17,000 hours of exposure to its first language before the age of four, so we’ve got a very limited exposure.
It comes down to making choices about what goes into those 400 or so hours, and they’re hard choices. It’s important that every hour counts.
To make some ideas from research more available, we are giving teachers access to summaries of research, which they can use and talk about in professional development. This seems to have positive effects - with really positive comments coming from many teachers in different contexts. Around 92 per cent of the teachers in the NCELP network reported that they’re confident in delivering teaching informed by research-informed principles, and they find NCELP resources useful. There have been about a quarter of a million downloads of the materials.
What other practical steps can MFL teachers take?
It’s all about making languages more accessible and therefore increasing student engagement.
To do this, it’s important to define the content clearly: rather than moving rapidly from one narrow topic to another, with lots of very specific words and grammar taught only with each topic, we emphasise the importance of practising a carefully identified set of language in lots of different and interesting contexts.
When students are given a set of vocabulary, that vocabulary must be ready to be manipulated into meaningful sentences. Instead of giving a list of 10 sports, for example, students could learn vocabulary sets of a few sports and some core verbs in a small number of forms, which allow them to create meaningful sentences.
Of course, some students might want to know the words for specific activities relevant to them - and that ownership of a personal vocabulary is important. But it doesn’t need to be misinterpreted to mean that all pupils need to know huge lists of highly specific vocabulary at this stage.
Rich and challenging texts need to be woven in at quite early stages. For example, some poems are in the Year 7 scheme of work, and we’ve got texts on religious festivals, historical events and geographical features.
We need to think more broadly about the type of language we are teaching. Your daily routine might not actually be what a 13-year-old wants to talk about with another 13-year-old. They may want to explore issues that are a bit more in line with the other subjects that they’re doing. Identifying the language to be learned doesn’t mean sacrificing interesting content - the two can go hand in hand.
