Consultation on the Department of Education’s GCSE modern foreign languages subject content review opened on 10 March 2021 and closes today, 19 May 2021.
Of course, as we have seen recently, two months can be a long time in education, allowing for a hundred visions and revisions. However, just now might not be the best time to be consulting language teachers about their core business.
It’s not just that all teachers are coping with a pandemic. Owing to teacher-assessed grades, they have also had to take on the simultaneous roles of teacher, examiner, marker, moderator and medical orderly.
If the timing isn’t ideal (has anyone in the Department for Education ever taught in a school to understand its cycles and its seasons?), the 31 pages of the supporting subject content review document aren’t an especially jolly read.
On page one, there are the usual pieties: “The study of a modern foreign language at GCSE should broaden students’ horizons, encourage them to step beyond cultural boundaries and develop new ways of seeing the world” and “An appreciation of the culture, history, geography and working environments of these countries and communities is an integral part of a well-designed course and is likely to be motivating and interesting for students”.
That’s all fine and dandy - to use a phrase that cannot be easily translated - but by page three of these 31 pages, the topic under discussion is vocabulary and the deadly list of 1,700 words. And, from page eight onwards, there are three annexes, listing the grammar requirements of French, Spanish and German. And that’s that - c’est tout.
The all-party parliamentary group on modern languages has produced a tightly packed page of “concern and disquiet”, with the support of most organisations with the words “teaching” and “languages” in their titles.
This is echoed by language teachers themselves. The specification of 1,700 words is “boring and arbitrary”, “random” and “sends out completely the wrong message”. After all, learning vocabulary isn’t the point: “Reading for gist, puzzling out meanings from context, spotting cognates are all core aspects of language learning.”
This leads on to the total absence of culture in the proposal. Despite the noble sentiments of page one, according to one teacher, “the cultural context seems to have been entirely stripped away, at least in terms of the assessment. I can’t imagine what a teaching programme looks like that has a list of words but no topics and no cultural context.”
And how do you justify the antique method of assessment - with the exam carved into four equal parts that leads to a continual need to teach in a way to satisfy this four-headed monster?
None of the teachers quoted above sees a way in which these changes would enthuse students, make them more interested in languages or encourage them to study languages beyond GCSE: “What kind of preparation is this for study beyond GCSE or use of the language in any real-world context?”
It shouldn’t be hard to motivate students for language learning, if it is presented correctly. After all, scores of people are choosing to do this with their free time. At a time when every survey of language teaching at every level is worrying at best, perhaps there needs to be deeper thought and more time given to that thought.
Perhaps, to quote Samuel Beckett, who wrote both Waiting for Godot and the original En Attendant Godot, they need to “fail again”, but “fail better”.
John Claughton is former chief master of King Edward’s School Birmingham
