R D Kernohan
Why don’t we mind our languages?
It’s not easy today for the old to enter into the minds of young people. It probably never was. But I offer one rewarding and shareable experience. You can resit your Highers or, more reasonably, you can do what many young people do in this season – look up previous papers and see how you would get on. I’ve just done it with Higher French and German – partly to see how far intermittent practical use of languages maintains examinable competence, but also to explore a national problem.
The British, and that includes the Scots, don’t much care for foreign languages. They’re travelling more but, despite the vast expansion of senior secondary and university education, and despite the introduction of foreign languages in primary schools, they’re learning them less earnestly.
If I read statistics aright – a task complicated by the rarity of words like pass and fail – about 4,600 young Scots managed Higher French last year and fewer than 1,300 Higher German, with a decline in both these major European languages hardly offset by a modest rise in Spanish. Despite recent Scottish Government publicity about its popularity, Spanish is only on about the sadly depressed level of German.
These are abject figures from an annual secondary education intake of about 60,000, especially taking account of the collapse of classical languages, which for some people could be a gateway to later knowledge of such Latin derivatives (I nearly said dialects) as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. But my lamentation is more in perplexed sorrow than anger – even though I’m not pleased to find that my old school, which offered French, German, Latin and Greek up to and beyond Higher level, now tackles only French. What especially saddens me is that learning another language ought to be a more stimulating and attractive prospect than ever before.
I’ve no reason to think today’s teachers are less skilled and dedicated than mine were – I hope they realise what a compliment that is – and they have enormous advantages over their predecessors in the availability of school travel and electronic aids. They can also help their pupils explore an internet which opens up a dazzling range of worldwide publishing and broadcasting. Even more important, they have (to my layman’s mind) syllabuses and examinations which relate modern languages to contemporary life far more readily than was done in my youth, and they emphasise the spoken language in a way that was never tackled in the rather cursory ‘orals’ of those days. This ought to narrow the gap which my generation could find between fluency in reading and adequacy in conversation.
I’ve just had a try at some Higher and Advanced Higher German and found passages that not only properly tested my comprehension but made me want to understand what I was reading. Could it be, for example, that this German writer not only had a sense of humour but could gently turn it against his countrymen’s well-known possessive attitude to deckchairs by the swimming-pool? Apparently yes. I even read on eagerly to see if he also described the way they plunder buffet-breakfasts to build up their packed lunch. And, while I ducked an invitation to write an essay on climate-warming, I had a quick and satisfying stab at the arguments for and against forcing pupils to stick with foreign-language study till they leave school. I’m sure that was a better test than some of the grim, dull prose passages we were asked to translate one way or the other.
I came out against compulsion, rather against my authoritarian inclinations, because I think the problem that I identify in Scotland and Britain generally, and in the United States too, and perhaps in France, is one of insufficient motivation; and compulsion can be a poor motivator. We don’t want to learn languages enough. We don’t feel we need to learn them. We’re tempted to say that they all speak English, don’t they. Or in the French case that they ought to know French, n’est-ce pas?
But why don’t we want to learn languages enough when there are obvious cultural and commercial advantages to knowing them, whether in understanding perplexing peoples, selling them whisky and insurance, or sharing the joke with Molière or Cervantes? Even some teachers suggest that it may be partly because we have made things more difficult by lack of rigour in teaching other subjects, especially our own English language. Foreign languages with more complex grammar seem even more difficult than they used to.
It may be fun of a sort to write an essay on climate-warming or language-learning. But even if dictionaries are now allowed in the exam room (which often seems to be the case) one can’t make much of a show without having a grasp of German grammar, syntax, and even accursedly irregular verbs. That must be trebly difficult for pupils who haven’t some idea of grammar and syntax in their own language. Maybe there is now an educational as well as a cultural-conservative reaction against this slackness of the last generation which will also help learners of other languages. But the deeper problems persist and may even be getting worse.
They are partly the result of our geographical and sometimes political insularity (which have much to be said in their favour) but they also involve estimates of the utility or futility of acquiring languages and ingrained insecurity or inadequacy in applying in more hectic surroundings what we’ve learned in a placid classroom. They are also affected by practical difficulties in expanding teaching of such important languages as Mandarin and Russian. Even Spanish seems to suffer from a scarcity of teachers and Portuguese (also spoken by more people than French) doesn’t seem to be in the Scottish system at all.
But I suggest that we also suffer from two serious misconceptions historically embedded both in our popular culture and our educational system. One is that the Scots, like the British generally, aren’t good at languages. The other (despite the recent ventures into primary schools) is that languages are really for the academically-gifted and inclined.
In fact there is plenty of evidence of that when properly-motivated Scots are good language learners – and not just the bilingual Gaels. Generations of Scots missionaries learned African and Asian languages; some still do. So too did colonial administrators and ‘white settlers’. The late Duke of Montrose was supposed to be a terrible Rhodesian reactionary but he spoke a fluent Shona that the more liberal of my white friends didn’t match.
Scots theologians headed for German universities before America became more fashionable. Scots traders and travellers picked up languages briskly enough in the days before the international spread of English. Even Scots soldiers got beyond sign language. When I was learning a rather academic German I was a bit snobby about my father’s pronunciation of bits and pieces he retained from the army of occupation after 1918. I was duly humbled when I heard the same pronunciations in the Rhineland when covering a German election campaign. Even today motivation can work wonders. Although I complain about the loss of languages in my old school, I discover that some pupils have readily learned a bit of extra-curricular German and Spanish for and from school exchanges.
Despite these hopeful signs and sturdy traditions our schools may still suffer from an attitude that dominated curriculum planning in my distant schooldays: the idea that languages are inherently difficult for ordinary people. We who were supposedly ‘bright’ were allowed two languages from the second year. The rest were stuck with either the French or Latin imposed on them in the first year – an especially cruel fate for those who never made much of Caesar’s PR handouts on the Gallic wars and could be denied their Highers as a result.
I think I accepted that received doctrine until I encountered South Africa. My own linguistic motivation was mainly to learn just enough Afrikaans to assure Pretoria burghers and backveld Boers that I was a visiting Scot and not an arrogantly monoglot English South African. But what amazed me was the capacity of black workers in apartheid South Africa to get a working knowledge of both the white man’s languages as well as more than one ‘Bantu’ language. Motivation was what mattered – and matters still not just in the new South Africa but throughout the world.
But motivation needs to go with encouragement, support, opportunity and good teaching. I fear that in contemporary Scotland the good teaching of languages is more plentiful than encouragement (or lack of it) from the political and philosophical planners of education.
I recognise all the difficulties of motivation when we are endowed with a world language whose outreach seems to spread (as some song says) ‘wider still and wider’. But a world language needs to go with a world view and any world view of educational priorities should see the value, perhaps necessity, of giving everyone means of basic access to cultures other than their own.
A lot can be done though continuing education and languages have their place in what current jargon calls ‘lifelong learning’. But the place to lay a sure foundation for lifelong learning is in school, through sound and enthusiastic teaching – and, where languages are concerned, by giving enough knowledge of the structure of our own language and at least one other to help in later encounters with even stranger tongues. That usually means mixing the enjoyment of grasping something of a language with the tedium that can be involved in learning it.
I once thought I had found a wonderful short-cut to at least a basic reading knowledge of an unfamiliar language. I bought the appropriate modern-language New Testament and read through the Gospel narratives and Paul’s letters. It worked well till I tried it in Hungary. I had to buy a Magyar grammar-book to get the hint of the hang of even the most familiar passages. At that point I think I just caught the faint echo of the laughter in the great celestial staffroom where my old teachers keep an eye on developments, envy the opportunities with modern electronic aids, and maybe grumble a little (as they once did to me) about inadequate attention given to irregular verbs.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
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01.04.10
Issue no 229
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Robin Downie
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Why don’t we
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R D Kernohan
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When friends
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