The Malaysian Insider

PARIS Oct 17 — For years, the French have complained that their beloved language, and indeed their very culture, is being invaded by English.

Now, it seems they have been resisting the attack — almost too well.

Lamenting their poor scores in international English tests, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced this week an emergency plan to overhaul the way the French learn foreign languages.

“All our high school students must become bilingual, and some should be trilingual,” he said while announcing his reform proposal for high schools.

Sarkozy, whose own English is patchy, said foreign language instruction needs a true revolution to expose students to native speakers, encourage them to talk in class and arrange linguistic study trips abroad.

Every high school will be required to establish a partnership with a foreign school to give children more opportunities to speak with their peers in another language.

The president also criticised the way the national graduation exam, or baccalaureate, assesses language proficiency.

Those who study Latin, he noted, are tested on their oral and written skills. Those who study English, with the exception of students specialising in literature, have to take only a written test.

Nearly all French students choose to study English as one of their required two foreign languages, starting at the age of eight in primary school. They are also exposed to English in movies, advertising, music and the Internet.

But not enough of them can use it well to compete in the global marketplace, the president said.

France spends 5.8 per cent of its gross domestic product on education, ranking it in the top five worldwide.

But French students overall rank poorly in the Toefl, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, which they have to take to study in the United States. France is in 69th place, out of 109 countries, in Toefl scores.

Sarkozy’s emphasis on getting the French to learn other languages goes against the grain for older people.

They were raised to believe that France has a “civilising mission” to the rest of the world, and that its bridgehead is the French language.

France has a minister in charge of francophone countries and promoting the language around the world.

The members of the Academie Francaise, the body created by royal decree in 1635 to preserve the purity of the French language, spend much of their time coming up with French words for new technologies in a constant battle against the intrusion of English. Previous governments have also wrestled with the problem of how to make the French conversant in languages other than their own. But they generally worried that languages other than English were getting short shrift and looked for ways to make the study of German, Italian and Asian languages more popular.

Teachers’ unions have resisted changes in the curriculum that would require more hours of foreign languages or favour native speakers as language teachers.

“Is the state going to train and hire new language teachers, or just settle for hiring people whose only qualification is that they speak a foreign language?” asked Gerard Aschieri, a union leader, after Sarkozy’s announcement.

Unions also complained that classes are generally too large to teach children effectively to speak a different language.

“At home, in families and in society at large, there is just not the idea that languages are something essential,” Christian Tremblay, director of the European Observatory for Plurilingualism, said in an interview with the Associated Press. “That is what we really have to change.” — The Straits Times

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