Why Modern Foreign Languages are useful

I've been trying to work out what to write about for a few days, and while I told Jenni I'd do something about fandom, I changed my mind at the last minute - sorry. (Fandom will come in due course).

I remember being confused when I was in French in year 7 as to why no-one in my class was finding the subject as interesting as I was, or at least as simple: there were at least four people other than me who had had three years' worth of French lessons beforehand!

And so that's what I'm writing about today - why so few people like learning languages. I was thinking about this because this week I've had to give GCSE options talks to the year nine students at my school studying 2 modern foreign languages - why it's good to carry on their second foreign language to GCSE level.



I will be perfectly honest with you: I never wanted to study Spanish. I only took it as a trade-off with my parents, who said that if I wanted to study dance, then I had to do either Spanish or IT - needless to say, I was never going to agree to IT. So I took Spanish reluctantly, and after a few lessons, just fell in love. And here I am. But I wanted to talk about why people tend to hate languages lessons and teachers.

I think the main reason that MFL teachers get so much stick is because their subject is hard. Languages are really difficult to get your head around, and so lots of people find them difficult. As a result, they hate on their teachers for making them carry it on - but languages teachers are lovely! In the summer I spent a week in my school's MFL department, observing lessons and talking to the teachers. I was wary of a couple who my friends had had, and had said that they didn't like, but I found them all to be really nice people - and seeing lessons from an outsider's point of view (sort of) made me see that people saying that "Mrs So-and-so is horrible to her classes, she's really strict" are obviously clouded by their dislike for the subject, which must be really hard for teachers to see - they're just doing their jobs.

But despite the lovely people that teach languages, at least in my school, there are only 17 people studying languages at AS level - 14 doing French, 5 doing Spanish and 3 doing German. (And don't lecture me about my maths, 4 of us do two languages). This is all despite the fact that nationally, the amount of people taking MFL GCSEs rose this summer. This confuses me.

Languages are something that will ALWAYS be useful: whether you're going on holiday, watching a foreign language film or dealing with a foreign client, there'll always be a use for people that speak multiple languages - at least I hope so, because that's what I want to do with my life. And it's not just a useful skill to have as a party trick: studies have shown that American bilinguals get paid between 4% and 20% more than their monolingual counterparts.

So why are languages universally disliked? At the moment, I don't really have an answer for that. But I intend to make it a life goal to find out, and to turn it around - and hey, if in ten years we're still writing this blog, I might even tell you!

~ Tess