France calls for plan to improve language teaching
PARIS — French children generally spend years learning foreign languages in school, but the results are often dismal. So President Nicolas Sarkozy called Tuesday for an emergency plan to produce more bilingual students.
In a speech outlining education reforms, Sarkozy underscored that “a foreign language is meant to be spoken,” and suggested language instruction should be shifted away from written grammar and memorization to emphasize oral skills.
Students in French public schools begin a second language in middle school and often receive up to six years of foreign language instruction. Still, many high school graduates struggle to express even the simplest thought in English, Spanish, German or other foreign languages.
Sarkozy noted with disapproval that French students rank 69th out of 109 countries on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL — the standard English-language test for foreign students worldwide, an exam primarily for those who wish to study in the United States. Given its resources, France would expect to rank much higher than that.
Besides a curriculum heavy on grammar, another stumbling block is the teachers themselves. Many are not native speakers of the languages they teach, and many have strong French accents.
Large class sizes might be another obstacle.
“You can’t develop oral communication in classes of 30 students,” said Thierry Cadart of the SGEN-CFDT education union.
Sarkozy, whose own English is notoriously weak, pledged to change the way foreign language learning is evaluated, to bring more native speakers into schools and to encourage French youths to study abroad.
The push to improve foreign language instruction comes as French — once the language of diplomacy and the lingua franca in much of the world — continues to lose ground to English. The rise of the Internet has underscored the need for improved English skills among French youth.
Christian Tremblay, who heads the European Observatory of Plurilinguism, a group dedicated to promoting foreign language learning, acknowledged the French system is “very average” but said he was skeptical Sarkozy’s proposals would bring radical change.
“The ‘great language syndrome’ is still very much alive and well in France,” said Tremblay. “At home, in families and in society at large, there’s just not the idea that languages are something essential. That’s really what we have to change.”
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