¡Viva la lengua! Keeping foreign languages alive in British schools
“PARLEZ-VOUS ANGLAIS?” These days, it is more than likely that your average school pupil will travel abroad and expect everyone they encounter to speak to them in English.
Where once Spanish, French and German were considered prestigious subjects to study, the fact that they are no longer compulsory at GCSE and A-Level, coupled with the idea that they are graded too harshly, means that less students than ever before are pursuing them at school and university.
One group trying to change all that is Routes into Languages, a govern- ment-funded project aiming to promote the study of foreign languages at secondary school.
E v e r y y e a r, t he group, which is run by universities across the country, puts on a national foreign language spelling bee competition for more than 87,000 students at 2,300 schools.
The spelling bee starts off as a class competition, with pupils challenged to spell words in German, Spanish and French. The winners of each class
(¡ round play against each other in the school final; three pupils from each school then proceed to the regional final. Finally, the top four pupils in each region in each language go through to the national final.
This year, Hasmonean High in Hendon is taking part, while in the past other Jewish schools including Yavneh College i n Borehamwood, King David in Manchester and King David in Liverpool have competed.
And, in what is an exciting prospect for the community, efforts are now being made to introduce Hebrew as Routes into Languages’ first “community language” — in a specialist competition for Jewish schools.
“You get a connection to a culture by speaking their language,” said Sarah Schechter, project manager of the eastern region of Routes into Languages, who is trying to pilot the community languages programme in Hebrew.
“Community languages are even more at risk because not enough pupils
Efforts are beingmade tointroduce HebrewasRoutes intoLanguages’ first‘community language’