Sadly it appears to be a trend amongst adult language learners is simply that numbers learning other languages is decreasing. Decreasing year after year. While this may be true – and it certainly seems to be the case in schools, our experience at UIC is a little different. We teach modern foreign languages int he evenings – the typical learner is in their mid to late 20s and doing something in their own time after work to improve their language skills. This year we have seen ever higher numbers – most of our beginners courses are now full up and are starting every month.

A recent survey conducted for CILT, the National Centre for Languages, has revealed that employers rank foreign language skills as second only to IT when it comes to finding the right candidate. It is clear that UK businesses feel strongly about getting this message across, since close to 300 of Britain’s top employers have signed up to a campaign to help young people bolster their employability by adding a language to their CV. Some of the businesses involved are household names, including Boots, HSBC, Arsenal FC, Weetabix, and Royal Mail. CILT is urging more UK businesses to follow the example and team up with schools to help demonstrate to young people just how valuable language skills can be in the workplace. This is something we at UIC feel passionately about – we have recently been to a secondary school to talk to the students about the advantages of learning languages and some of the career opportunities that can be opened up by being proficient in more than just English.

CILT has recently launched a new Languages Work website and we will be commenting more on this in the coming weeks. Kathryn Board, Chief Executive of CILT, said: “In the current economic climate, it’s more important than ever to give young Britons the skills they need to build a successful career for themselves. Languages are a vital asset across a huge range of job sectors, and Languages Work wants to work closely with teachers, parents and careers advisers to get this crucial message across.”

It strikes us that one of the reasons people are put off learning languages – or carrying on with their studies is the experience they had at school. Will Self in the Guardian this week talking about his experience learning French at school, will certainly ring a bell with a few of us “…he dutifully drilled us through the chapters, which featured the predictable little screeds on the doings of stock French characters – Chantal, Pierre, their parents M and Mme Hulot – followed by exercises on grammar: tenses, the genders of words, the parts of speech and so forth”.

This predictably enough put him off studying French for years. He has now decided to try learning French again and signed up to a week of intensive 1:1 classes with a London school. He says “after one week I’m enormously enthused. The .. method consists of speaking in French from the get-go: the lessons are conducted entirely in French and the pupil is encouraged to formulate quite complex sentences immediately”. Notice the big differences? Native French teacher and plenty of natural communication! It’s not really to difficult to see why this should be much more  successful – as well as good fun. All the language teachers at UIC are native – they are all trained teachers as well and  with a maximum of 12 in a class (the private tuition Will Self had might be ideal but is rather expensive at over £1000 for a week). They help you communicate form the start – even though there is a certain amount of reading and writing the emphasis is on communicating and it is successful. It’s not a rocket science to see that this is why people keep on coming back for more. (It’s also worth noting that our memories of what goes on in school is also rather out of date – most schools nowadays do teach children in a communicative way although of course they are up against it as they can’t usually employ native speakers and there are always pupils in classes who don’t want to be there and who are likely to mess around).

Commenting on how important this can be, Self describes how English speakers who can actually speak foreign languages don’t make enough of it. “Most English speakers of foreign languages that I know don’t make much of a noise about it – but I wish they would: all the emphasis in our multicultural society seems to be upon making incomers comfortable – and conformable to us – but being bilingual ourselves is an essential attribute for being at home in the wider world.”

Are there are little signs to be optimistic about! Perhaps with the work CILT are doing, improvements to the National Curriculum and the continuing growth of evening classes at languages schools this slow decline might be at least slowed – even if not reversed!

The question our foreign language department is most often asked by potential students: ‘if I come for a 10 week course will I be fluent?’

Now, that might seem like a funny question if you know anything about languages and learning languages but there is a serious side to it – so let’s look at what it could possibly mean! If someone studies a course for 20 hours from a beginner’s level they will cover a certain number of things -  some basic vocabulary, greetings, some simple question and answers, describing things, numbers, buying things in shops and so on. They will begin to learn how to talk about the past and the future. 

The issue of how much you can learn in a given period or a set number of hours is really a complicated one. Think back to school and how much you learned in a classroom the first time you learned a foreign language – 2 hours a week for a term is about the same as one of our courses. At the end of one term I really bet you wouldn’t have learned much at all but then consider how different your situation is now: if you come to study at UIC you are an adult, you are motivated, you are in a small class (average10) with other motivated adults, you have an enthusiastic native speaker teaching you and you have a syllabus which is communicative – all pretty much the opposites of what happened at school … (remember those huge classes of disinterested children and a teacher who may not have known much of the language?)

Of course as well as what we can offer you there are also all sorts of personal factors to take into account as well – are you good at learning languages, have you got a good memory? have you got good pronunciation? what is your motivation for learning a language?

So let’s have a look at what it might mean to be fluent? Fluent to do what would be a good place to start! The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) sets out a framework where you can find descriptions about the different competencies you would be expected to have to survive at different levels. These range form level A1 (Beginner) all the way up to C2 which is approximating a native speaker. So, to go back and try to answer our question about being fluent in a language – if we set the level at the lowest we might describe as fluent – level B2 – we would expect someone at this level to be able to:

Listening & Speaking: can follow or give a talk on a familiar topic or keep up a conversation on a fairly wide range of topics

Reading: Can scan texts for relevant information and understand detailed instructions or advice

Writing: Can make notes while someone is talking or write a letter including non-standard requests

This is a level also typically described as Intermediate and we would expect this to take something like 9 months of fulltime study for an adult. There has been a recent development  in extreme exchanges – see this article in the Independent where children go to live with a partner in another country for 6 months at the age of 10 – and do tend to come back properly fluent but then you have to remember they re 10 years old and living in another country with no access to their own language! That’s a bit different to coming to classes once a week in London.
So although we can teach you a lot more than you expect (especially if you’re comparing it to your school experience) I’m sorry to say you’re not going to get fluent in 10 weeks. But don’t let that stop you coming to see – get in touch with us at UIC and see how we can help you.