English isn't enough

[Loki]

I agree that learning or as some prefer to say aqcuiring a second language differs from how you did it with your mother tongue. It is mostly because of the methods we choose. (Many people disagree with the methods of traditional language learning. If you?re interested you may check out some websites: Antimoon.com: How to learn English effectively; Comprehensible input - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; About | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time). But what I really meant when I wrote that sentence was: the ability to learn languages is innate to us and we shouldn?t underestimate ourselves only because we?re older then twelve.

Ok, right. We shouldn't underestimate ourlselves, but it's still undeniably (I like this word!) more difficult for us to learn a language when we are older than that. I'll probably pick up my linguistics book again, in order to be more precise, if the case.
And I'll take a look at these websites (thanks for the suggestion, by the way!).

 

[Eric]

DWM, OK, you didn't imply that Brits are less intelligent than Continentals. But why is it then that you imply (I hope I've got it right, this time) that not every UK child has the ability to learn languages, so maybe they shouldn't all be given the chance?

In my opinion, every UK schoolchild who has not got severe learning difficulties, should be prodded for at least a few months or years to learn at least one foreign language. They can then drop them at some stage, should they prove to be genuinely language-blind. But it's the same argument with a lot of so-called dyslexia: it's not always a medical condition, but a combination of poor teaching, lack of motivation, plus the innate laziness that many of us suffer from.

*

My argument against the age of eight or nine is that children need to first get their mother-tongue well embedded in their minds.

In our European countries where there are many, many immigrants, the lingua franca of the nation (e.g. English in the UK) must take priority, so that you don't get several generations of unemployable descendants of immigrants all speaking their different forms of "immigrant English".

Those who could speak dialect in the past could often switch to standard English. So when they moved about the country they could fit in. But if 70% of your class, at the age of eight, does not have English as the home language, there is a big risk that many children will grow up speaking substandard English and not be able to code-switch to a more acceptable middle-class version. This leads to job apartheid.

So while you can certainly mess about with a bit of vocabulary for French at the age of eight, and teach a few phrases, I would not teach language to children in a structured way until a few years later.

 

[pesahson]

DWM, OK, you didn't imply that Brits are less intelligent than Continentals. But why is it then that you imply (I hope I've got it right, this time) that not every UK child has the ability to learn languages, so maybe they shouldn't all be given the chance?

I had the same impression as Eric. I mocked it a bit when I wrote:

So how did it happen that English became the new lingua franca? I mean, there must a lot of really talented foreigners who managed to learn the language!

 

[DWM]

My point was simply that not all children or adults (whether in the UK or not, as we could also be speaking of the US or NZ or Australia) are equally gifted at languages, and may not be sufficiently interested to learn a foreign tongue. Therefore there shouldn't be an element of coercion involved in language teaching policy.

If you misunderstood, then it's probably my fault, but I hope I've made myself clear this time.

Peace.

 

[hdw]

My point was simply that not all children or adults (whether in the UK or not, as we could also be speaking of the US or NZ or Australia) are equally gifted at languages, and may not be sufficiently interested to learn a foreign tongue. Therefore there shouldn't be an element of coercion involved in language teaching policy.

If you misunderstood, then it's probably my fault, but I hope I've made myself clear this time.

Peace.

Not all adults or children are equally gifted at mathematics - I certainly wasn't, and I wasn't sufficiently interested to learn it - but unfortunately my teacher wouldn't listen to me and I had to do it anyway.

If you go down the route of only letting kids do what they are "sufficiently interested" in, they'll end up kicking a ball and playing computer games.

I am currently worried - just as a concerned adult - about the new so-called "Curriculum for Excellence" in Scottish schools, which starts its hopefully short-lived life today, the first day of the new school year in parts of the country (not Edinburgh). Just as in the fashion world hemlines go up and hemlines go down, amid much oohing and aahing from the fashionistas, so in educational circles the wheel keeps being reinvented, and the educational gurus in Scotland have just rediscovered the cross-curricular "project", something that was already old-hat in primary schools by the time I did my teacher-training in 1969-70.

Now it's to be introduced into secondary schools - no more discrete periods of biology, chemistry, maths., geography etc. - and the current batch of schoolkids are being required to study the careers of business entrepreneurs like Duncan Bannatyne of TV reality show fame. All very well and good and rooted in the real world, far from the ivory tower, but my fear is that when these same kids try to get into a decent university at the end of their schooldays, they will find that those benighted old-fogey institutions will, I'm afraid, be looking for good exam. marks and in-depth knowledge of whichever ... ahem! ... subject said youngster wants to study to degree level.

And reverting to the original subject of this thread, foreign languages, an explanatory column in today's Scotsman about how barriers will be broken down between chemistry, physics, biology, maths., history, English, etc., says NOT ONE WORD about any foreign language.

Harry

 

[miercuri]

My point was simply that not all children or adults (whether in the UK or not, as we could also be speaking of the US or NZ or Australia) are equally gifted at languages, and may not be sufficiently interested to learn a foreign tongue. Therefore there shouldn't be an element of coercion involved in language teaching policy.

Not all people are equally gifted at mathematics either, but that doesn't mean it should be taken out of the school curriculum. Those who are gifted will certainly pursue it further, and those who aren't will certainly be left with some useful basic knowledge.

Teaching a language in a structured way is indeed desirable and it can only be accomplished once the students have the same understanding of their mother tongue, but developing basic conversation and writing skills at a young age, as well as exposing children to a foreign language in class, using films, music, drama, can really be very effective. And once they start learning it formally, by having grammar explained to them, they will immediately have something to relate their basic knowledge to, rahter than trying to aquire both the formal aspects of a language as well as the practical ones simultaneously.
I started learning English at six and French at ten. I've come to regret not having started French earlier.

edit: it seems that Harry and I used the same example

 

[DWM]

The trouble with coercion is that it doesn't work. If you force children to learn languages, they will learn them badly, or not at all. There's little point in that.

Look at the situation with "compulsory Swedish" in Finnish schools. That has been a disaster, and has led to even fewer Finns learning Swedish.

Leaving languages as an option on the curriculum is a great idea, however, and I fully support it.

As I said earlier in this thread, the situation is analogous to the one regarding literary translations. If you try to force translations on readers, they won't read 'em.

 

[hdw]

The trouble with coercion is that it doesn't work. If you force children to learn languages, they will learn them badly, or not at all. There's little point in that.

Look at the situation with "compulsory Swedish" in Finnish schools. That has been a disaster, and has led to even fewer Finns learning Swedish.

Leaving languages as an option on the curriculum is a great idea, however, and I fully support it.

As I said earlier in this thread, the situation is analogous to the one regarding literary translations. If you try to force translations on readers, they won't read 'em.

In the case of Swedish in Finland, there could be some lingering resentment about what could almost be regarded as the former "colonial" language. I've heard anecdotal stories about people speaking Swedish in the street in Helsinki being approached by a drunk snarling "In Finland we speak Finnish!" (Suomessa puhut??n suomea - if I haven't forgotten my little bit of Finnish).

When I lived in Sweden in the early 1970s there were plenty of Finns living there, and I taught some in English classes, so a knowledge of Swedish would certainly have been indispensable for them. Perhaps Finland is now such a "Baltic tiger" that its citizens have no need to move to Sweden for work.

Harry

 

[DWM]

In the case of Swedish in Finland, there could be some lingering resentment about what could almost be regarded as the former "colonial" language.

I think it's just that most young Finns don't see Swedish as being of much use in the modern world. If they do learn a foreign language they want it to be English. Again, it's the carrot that beats the stick - there has to be an incentive, or kids won't respond.

 

[hdw]

I think it's just that most young Finns don't see Swedish as being of much use in the modern world. If they do learn a foreign language they want it to be English. Again, it's the carrot that beats the stick - there has to be an incentive, or kids won't respond.

But I come back to my previous point about the numbers of Finns who work - or at least used to work - in Sweden. I taught English to Finnish adult students in the provincial backwater of Finsp?ng, in the wilds of ?sterg?tland, where they certainly weren't using English to communicate with their workmates. If they had been forced to learn Swedish at school in Finland, it had stood them in good stead. But at that time Finland wasn't the country of Nokia etc. like it is now, and maybe there is no longer the need to go to Sweden to look for work.

So many Finns came to work in Sweden that there was a whole battery of prejudices against them. My Swedish girlfriend tended to share them (Finns get drunk, are violent, fight with knives). A bit like the perception of the Scots and Irish among some English people.

Harry

 

[DWM]

But I come back to my previous point about the numbers of Finns who work - or at least used to work - in Sweden.

Yes. Today many young Finns are more likely to go and work in Russia - Russian being the other language, besides English, that's currently in demand in Finland.

A bit like the perception of the Scots and Irish among some English people.

Though when Finns and Russians get together who knows what may happen.

 

[Eric]

Harry says:

Just as in the fashion world hemlines go up and hemlines go down, amid much oohing and aahing from the fashionistas, so in educational circles the wheel keeps being reinvented, and the educational gurus in Scotland have just rediscovered the cross-curricular "project", something that was already old-hat in primary schools by the time I did my teacher-training in 1969-70.

My father, who was a schoolmaster, as they termed them in the 1960s, also complained about unnecessary change in England back then. When politicians want to appeal to the masses, the curriculum of schools, and selection, are great areas to mess about with.

*

With regard to compulsory Swedish (aka "pakkoruotsi" in Finnish), it depends on where the state is forcing people to learn Swedish (which only 6% of Finnish citizens speak as their mother tongue).

In areas near the coast where there are communities speaking both languages, it is sensible to protect the remains of Swedish (as it is inevitably dying out). But in vast tracts of Finland it is a pointless exercise, as English has overtaken the second national language in prominence. Only for cultural reasons can you justify more than a smattering of Swedish for communities in Lapland and indeed most of the Finnish interior.

*

To address Harry's point, it isn't so much the colonial aspect of Swedish (i.e. Sweden having ruled Finland as a colony) but more a resentment that a certain Swedish-speaking ?lite in Helsinki / Helsingfors, the capital city, used to have the upper hand regarding finance. There is a world of difference between the speech, attitudes, and modes of behaviour of an Ostrobothnian Swedish-speaker and one from the capital, Helsinki. Nowadays, this Swedish-speaking money ?lite is slowly moving over to the Finnish language, generation by generation. So proletarian Finnish-speakers around Helsinki will have to find another source of envy.

*

DWM, as Harry points out, Swedish was of a great deal of use in the 1970s, when I first came to Finland and people were emigrating en masse from Finland to Sweden to find work. Hence even today the large numbers of Sweden-Finns as they are termed. Many went back to Finland as the Finnish economy got better. But not all.

*

DWM, I'm not so sure about the numbers of Finns going to work in Russia compared with the number of Russians who have come to work in Finland. I read somewhere that nowadays there are roughly as many Russian immigrants in Finland as there are Finland-Swedes. That must be around 300,000 people. That is a huge demographic change since the 1970s when I first experienced Finland. In those days only a tiny handful of exile Russians lived in Helsinki, maybe a couple of hundred people. Things may change with the new gas pipeline, which will attract Finnish workers to the area around Viborg. This will be rather ironic, given the fact that the Russians nicked the Finnish city of Viborg half a century ago, turning it from a cosmopolitan city into a crime-ridden Russian backwater.

 

[DWM]

Swedish was of a great deal of use in the 1970s, when I first came to Finland

Yes, but it's not of much use now. Most non-intellectual Finns (the majority) take a rather negative view of Sweden as a country, and beyond the odd shopping trip to Stockholm on the night ferry, the place is not considered worthy of much attention. Finland's Swedish-speaking minority is also viewed with increasing suspicion by the rest of the population these days - as in the recent debate surrounding Swedish-language instruction in Finnish schools. Just read the Helsingin Sanomat discussion boards to see what I mean.

I'm not so sure about the numbers of Finns going to work in Russia compared with the number of Russians who have come to work in Finland.

I don't have exact figures either, but it depends on what you call "Russia". Most Finns use the word to mean the 300 kilometers or so between Helsinki and St Petersburg, and nowadays there is quite a lot of summer employment for young Finnish people in that area (the Vyborgsky Rayon of Leningrad Oblast, which also hosts a local Finnish-speaking population, as it was once part of Finland). In the 1970s and 80s many of those kids would probably have gone to Sweden to work, when Viipuri and its surroundings were still under Soviet control. Finns also work in offices and business enterprises in St Petersburg, where they might have gone to Stockholm in the past.

You refer to the growing numbers of Russians in Finland proper: this population influx has given rise to a need for Russian-speakers, especially in Finland's local government agencies and service industries, and this, too, provides the kind of employment that might once have been available to Swedish-speakers. It's another reason for the decline of Swedish as a "useful" language.

 

[Mirabell]

While motivation, via the right kind of incentives, might succeed in interesting English schoolchildren in foreign languages, coercion will definitely fail.

It's as simple as that.

I was coerced to learn Maths and Latin. I can still use both. What's with all this motivate the children nonsense. Coercion works find.

 

[miercuri]

I was coerced to learn Maths and Latin. I can still use both. What's with all this motivate the children nonsense. Coercion works find.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one thinking like that, however barbaric this view on education might seem in Western Europe.

 

[DWM]

What's with all this motivate the children nonsense. Coercion works find.

Well, we shall agree to disagree.

 

[hdw]

Well, we shall agree to disagree.

I'm capable of agreeing and disagreeing with myself at the same time. What I think about the coercion argument is that teachers have to strike a fine balance between instilling basic building-blocks of subjects - without knowledge of which you are handicapped - and as far as possible making the rest of the curriculum as much fun as you can.

My late father-in-law was a PE teacher but also found himself teaching maths. and other subjects in the English grammar school he had attended himself as a boy. His attitude to the "times-table" was that kids had to grit their teeth and learn it, and there was no way you could make it huge fun for them.

Likewise, in language instruction, I don't see how you can give children a real, deep understanding of inflected languages without drilling them in conjugations and declensions, which ain't no fun. My two sons did French and German respectively at secondary school and never seemed to pick up more than a few useful phrases for using in a caf?. They were OK as long as the phrases they had learned came up, but were baffled by anything more demanding. When I went to work in Germany in 1977 I found that my rusty school German was very different from the local dialect in my Lower Rhine village, but at least I knew how German verbs and nouns worked and it didn't take me long to become pretty fluent. So belated thanks to the terrifying Mr. Soutar in my old school who drilled me in vocabulary and morphology and who would roar like a lion, lift the lid of his desk and slam it down with a deafening bang if your stuttering answer failed to come up to his expectations.

Some of the things my old teachers said and did would have them up in court and on the front pages of the tabloids these days.

Harry

 

[Eric]

Thank-you DWM for drawing my attention to the Svenskfinland website. I shall keep an eye on it.

I must be one of the very few British residents of Uppsala that has kept his or her Finland-Swedish accent when speaking Swedish. This is an accent I first learnt in ?bo in 1972 on my year abroad from the University of East Anglia. So I am by no means anti-Finland-Swedish. Far from it. My little library at home has vastly more Finland-Swedish books than ones from the country I now live in.

I read a reader's letter in Helsingin Sanomat the other day where a Finnish-speaker, judging by the name, supported the idea of Swedish-speakers having the right to speak their mother-tongue when patients at that controversial hospital. (For those of you who don't know, Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest Finnish-speaking daily in Finland.)

You will note the name Zinaida Lind?n, the only native-speaker of Russian that I know of who, when moving to Finland, decided to write literature in Swedish, not Finnish. But one short-story writer is the exception that proves the rule, no doubt.

The lungs of the Swedish language on Finland's territory are Ostrobothnia and, indeed, ?land. Also the rural areas and small towns of Nyland / Uusimaa. But if it were not for the presence of Sweden next door, I think that the Swedish language would have dwindled more rapidly. Swedish is slowly slipping away in Helsinki, as the Finnish language has an overwhelming and dominant presence there. Even twenty years ago I could hardly get served in a bank in Swedish in central Helsinki. But you can't fight against demography once the tipping point has been reached.

If you want to bask in the Finland-Swedish version of the Swedish language, you have to go and stay or live in Nykarleby or on ?land. Borg? and Eken?s (nowadays: Raseborg. See: http://www.raseborg.fi/) are gradually being lost regarding the Swedish language, I fear. As is ?bo, which even in 1972 had a very small number of Swedish-speakers, despite their prestigious Swedish-seaking university, ?bo Akademi.

The fact that the oblast is still called Leningrad shows how skin deep the reforms are in Russia. It's like still having the G?ring Gau in Germany. It's funny how Russian Communist murderers and fanatics get off much more lightly than Nazi German ones.

*

Regarding school, I think that people sometimes assume that discipline and drilling means that the school is either a laid back Montessori School with Steineristic projects, or, on the other hand, a martinet institution where T?rless would long back to Kakania.

It seems daft to me to throw out the sensible discipline (quiet in class, respect for the teacher), confusing it with kinky masters caning boys bare bottoms ("Bend over, boy. Six of the best. Thwack!") and other signs of ardent disciplinarianism.

 

[pesahson]

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one thinking like that, however barbaric this view on education might seem in Western Europe.

I tend to agree with that either. I wouldn't mind if latin and greek came back to schools and kids had to memorise latin conjugations.

 

[DWM]

=hdw;70145
Some of the things my old teachers said and did would have them up in court and on the front pages of the tabloids these days.

Yes, indeed - and it's just as well, I think. As someone who went to school in Scotland in the 1950s and was beaten for making mistakes in my sums, I'm glad that the world has moved on. But it's not just a matter of authoritarianism versus liberalism: we need a whole different approach to education and a reassessment of its meaning, for the issues involved in it underlie the whole of our existence. As Hannah Arendt wrote:

The role played by education in all political Utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception; instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. For this reason, in Europe, the belief that one must begin with the children if one wishes to produce new conditions has remained principally the monopoly of revolutionary movements of tyrannical cast which, when they came to power, took the children away from their parents and simply indoctrinated them. Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. He who seriously wants to create a new political order through education, that is, neither through force and constraint nor through persuasion, must draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the banishment of all older people from the state that is to be founded. But even the children one wishes to educate to be citizens of a Utopian morrow are actually denied their own future role in the body politic, for, from the standpoint of the new ones, whatever new the adult world may propose is necessarily older than they themselves. It is in the very nature of the human condition that each new generation grows into an old world, so that to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers' hands their own chance at the new.

The Crisis in Education (1961)