22 The Linguist Vol/60 No/3 2021
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Can a university outreach programme help secondary
school students to Love Languages, asks Jon Datta
T
his time last year I was a maths
teacher and senior secondary school
leader teaching a group of Year 11
French students (ages 15-16) in a severely
disadvantaged area of Hertfordshire. The fact
that a maths specialist was teaching GCSE
French highlights the impact of nationwide
staff shortages in modern languages and
uncertainty around Brexit's impact on
language learning. Worse, after two
recruitment drives for a part-time French
teacher, I was the highest qualified candidate.
I had studied French as part of a joint
honours degree 14 years previously. Why
part-time? The class in question was the last
remaining French class in the school.
Throughout the year, I regularly thought
'How on earth did it get to this?' I had been
hired to drive school improvement and to
raise standards in maths. Yet here I was
reminding myself of grammatical conjugations.
I was just one step ahead of the students.
Despite the enormous challenge, stress
and workload of re-learning aspects of the
French language and researching best
practice pedagogy, I was hopeful that I could
make a transformative impact. I wanted to
convey my fascination with languages. I
wanted my students to develop empathy
and respect for people regardless of
nationality, and to see the importance of truly
understanding one another. And I wanted to
enrich their outlooks and lives in the process.
In reality, instead of cultural immersion, I
drilled the students on vocabulary and
grammar. My class had been taught by a
cover teacher, on and off, since Year 7 (ages
11-12). Morale was low. I was trying to cram
years of curriculum content into a single year,
and in terms of accountability, the outcomes
were more important than the process.
By the time schools closed to most
children on 23 March 2020, I was confident
that my class would perform significantly
better than expected in their GCSEs. This
wasn't because they were particularly fluent
in French, but because they had taken on
board the necessary methods of gaining
marks in a challenging and severely graded
course. In fact, with predicted grades
replacing traditional exams during the
pandemic, I felt cheated that all of our hard
work over the past six months would not be
reflected through their exam performance.
However, a nagging feeling persisted that
no matter how successful the students were,
they hadn't really connected to the language
Inspiring study
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