How good/bad was your school languages experience...in reality?

[Le Baron]

The tag 'in reality' is fairly interesting I think. I hardly need to say much about the general view of language teaching/experiences in schools, except that I think it needs fairer scrutiny.
I attended two secondary schools, the first two years at a general comprehensive and the last three at a place where I got a scholarship after passing an entrance exam. The latter school had more facilities and an 'improved' teacher-to-pupil ratio. This is commonly thought to improve outcomes. It was also more inclined to pushing 'aspiration'. One would think the languages teaching would be vastly superior to the comprehensive school, but really I don't think it was. Which is not to say I think they were both mediocre, but actually reasonably good.

As I see it there were never any especial failings with language teaching in the UK curriculum in contrast to schools elsewhere; it has only ever been a geographical thing (living on a island) and the position of English. Aside from this I feel I learned a reasonable amount at school. I did Latin (French until third year and only sat an A level exam at college to bump up my A level count) and German and the classes were good and varied and lots of us got decent results on our oral exams for German.

Isn't the problem that language learners such as we are here expect too much of such a school system? Isn't it strange that it is criticised for not turning out accomplished speakers across the board, but also that we don't expect schools to produce entire classes of accomplished mathematicians or the same in any discipline? We get the range of not very good, to okay, to decent, to rather good. According to ability and whatever other factors. Since if a school turns out some excellent students who usually go on to study languages, at least something must be working.

I never expected anything more than average Latin competence. Considering you have to do an array of other disciplines alongside (I was at a music-based school). Or that I would speak German like a boss, though we did well enough on exchange trips. None of our learning involved Anki-ing or hours upon hours of recorded input or 'native content' - which was harder to access then - or any of the things people here do.
Later on I forgot a lot of German from neglect, but when I picked it up again everything I learned at school was extremely useful. I'm glad it was all done at a much younger age since this seems to stick with you. Isn't it that we expect too much and that because language learning to a high level is a long game requiring focus rather than being shared with 15+ other subjects, we make unfair comparisons?

[gsbod]

I'm sure I've posted about my school language experience before, but anyway, I would summarise it as inconsistent.

I went to school in the UK in the 1990s. I attended a failing comprehensive school from the ages of 11-16. A couple of years after I left it failed inspection and was shut down for good. So in that context, the fact that I still have warm memories of two of my French teachers is a positive thing. Most of my French ability, even today, is thanks to them. The German teachers were terrible though, so I dropped the language as soon as I could and really learned nothing of any use.

I then went on to a poor quality sixth form college where the teaching was poor across the board (not just languages) and expectations were low.

I was actually pretty bitter about my experiences in education for a very long time, but I finished compulsory education some 25 years ago now so my attitude has mellowed. I had a tough time in my 20s with low self confidence and difficulty figuring out my purpose or place in the world, and my educational experiences definitely contributed to this. But then again, I could have gone to a brilliant school, and still struggled with early adulthood because it's tough for a lot of people... In any case, I'm fairly contented with my life now (not to mention what I've gone on to achieve with languages as an adult) so it doesn't really matter any more.

I do think in the UK there is a tendency to have too high expectations of what compulsory schooling can do, and too low expectations of what adults can achieve once they've finished with school. People fret about young people falling behind, while also underestimating the capacity of adults to excel at learning if given the time, opportunity and resources to do so.

[Le Baron]

Interesting remarks. I'll pick out this final paragraph:

I do think in the UK there is a tendency to have too high expectations of what compulsory schooling can do, and too low expectations of what adults can achieve once they've finished with school. People fret about young people falling behind, while also underestimating the capacity of adults to excel at learning if given the time, opportunity and resources to do so.

I'm moved to agree. Especially in regard to education in adulthood outside schooling (which isn't official higher education). Since the access to Open University on the TV was withdrawn and the BBC's previously very vigorous and worthy output of foreign language courses ceased, this has been handicapped even more.

Congrats on achieving success against the odds.

[Iversen]

I have always had a tendency to do my own thing if I didn't get enough challenges from the teacher, and I have never really found it useful to have classmates sitting around me - and the small enforced pseudo conversations were simply embarrassing. But I did learn my languages, and by and large my teachers accepted my excentricities.

To be more specific I have to mention each language separately. Sorry for writing such a long rant.

Danish --- well, my native language. Before I started school at the age of 6½ my aunt told my mother that I could read the subtitles on TV (we didn't have TV ourselves yet). And in school I shocked our class teacher (also our teacher of Danish) by choosing a dictionary as my free reading book instead of some boring literary stuff for children. The result was that I hardly ever made a spelling error. Apart from that I wrote the required essays etc. - OK, near the end of the 60s I wrote an essay about the Biafra war as a mathematical article, and I had also fun with other topics, but I generally followed the rules.

English from 4. class (age 10½). I had learnt some English from TV (Fred Flintstone's "Yabbadabbadoo" was my first English word) . I ordered the catalogues from London's Natural History Museum home to our local library on my mother's library card, so I must have been able to read English fluently before the age of 13. I also glared stiffly at a native English teacher we had one year whenever he pronounced something differently from our previous native Danish teacher - like diphtong /ay/ for the article "a". But apart from that I don't remember many details.

German from 5. class: same history. We didn't have cable yet, but my mother had bought a TV so we could receive NDR on a good day,so I got a headstart in German there. And therefore I didn't really notice what happened in class - except some useful thing like "an auf hinter in neben über unter vor zwischen". We later got Latin with the same teacher, and there he didn't have to teach us to speak so there his natural leaning towards the grammar-translation could be carried through to the letter. I later found out that I remembered a lot of grammar and vocabulary, and then I just had to add some active training to become a mediocre Latinist. So the vilified method was good at what it did - it just had some serious limitations.

French: in the Gymnasium (high school, lycée) we got a teacher who was a staunch supporter of the socalled natural method (i.e. French only from day one). He was an extemely intelligent and funny man, but after 2½ year - when we only had ½ year left before the final exam - he suddenly spoke Danish to us : he had concluded that practically the whole bunch of us math-phys students would flunk ignominously at the exam, so the last half year he reverted to the good ol' black school methods (except the whip), and most of the class passed the exam! I was one of the few exceptions who might have passed with or without the method switch, and I had a special game with him: he knew that I had studied Italian and Spanish secretly at home, so when he posed questions in French to my classmates I often got a question in Italian or Spanish instead. It was great fun, but since then I have never really trusted the so-called natural method.

I had the same attittude to my other subjects, and my teachers generally accepted that I ran my own learning processes in parallel to their teaching. And my class mates had always seen me as a weirdo, but without the negative reactions which I have heard so much about in videos about giftedness on Youtube. That pattern continued into the university, where the culmination probably was when I had an oral exam in French grammar and drew the question "Adverbial subordinates" (adverbielle bisætninger). The other students asked collectively whether I would allow them to sit and listen to the examination from the back of the room. I was happy to say yes, because I knew that my first sentence would be "the category of adverbial subordinates doesn't exist" (in Danish). And then I proved that the presumed category from the grammar books was a hotch-potch of unrelated constructions that didn't deserve to be accepted as a category. QED... and a note at the top of the scale.

I had done similar things before in other classes, but this was at a final exam so maybe I took a risk, but my experience with teachers has always been that once they have accepted that you know your stuff they are fairly permissive - and sometimes even reward you for being an independent mind. Like in 'Oldtidskundskab' (='auld time knowledge') in the 'Gymnasium' where I was asked about the notion of hybris and chose to exemplify it with the one of just two tragedies about king Kreon that was NOT part of the pensum - and then I had to admit that I hadn't the faintest idea about what was included in the curriculum and what wasn't. I got a top note, even though I hadn't taken the extra precaution of learning Ancient (Attic) Greek - which I still haven't done (shame on me ).

[Amandine]

It is (was) compulsory to do at least 100 hours of LOTE (‘Language Other Than English’) in early high school where I grew up but since I went to school in the country we did not have the teachers for such things and I did precisely zero seconds of it in 12 years of schooling. On my certificate next to LOTE it has “Exemption Code:xxxx” which stood for attending a low socio economic school - although it’s more about the locations than income or class since every low SES school in Sydney fulfilled the language requirements because a lot more potential teachers live here. And in Sydney there would be a lot of students from non English speaking backgrounds which brings the whole topic much more front of mind than for my almost exclusively Anglo environment. I did try to teach myself Russian and French in high school (pre-internet) so I had an interest anyway and would’ve gobbled up an actual class.

Both schools I went to for HS do now have languages, according to their websites so I’m glad the new generation gets the opportunity to be completely bored and learn nothing that I never had!!

[rdearman]

As a young teenage boy I felt compelled to take French. This was not a requirement by the school system but rather a hormonal need. The French teacher was in her twenties, blonde, beautiful and dressed in a manner which practically demanded attendance by all male students and probably the faculty as well.

I learnt about 4 words in French in school but that class was my favourite.

[tastyonions]

I had three years of Spanish in high school. It’s hard to say how good or bad it was because I was simply wholly uninterested in it at the time, and did only the minimum needed to keep up a decent grade in the course, which was not a whole lot. I remember being aware of other people who were more “into” languages, including participating in conversation clubs and stuff after school, but I hadn’t caught that bug yet.

When I took Spanish back up ten years later, not having used it in the meantime, I remembered very little.

[galaxyrocker]

I absolutely would never have been fluent in Irish without the classes I took while at uni. Now, it helped they were smaller so we got a lot more practice in it, but honestly, they were great and set us up where a bit of immersion did us wonders. It was also great that the teacher would meet with us outside of class and answer any questions, etc. I'd often spend office hours just practicing too. But the class itself set me up to be able to do so, and they were really well structured to get us using the language.

[Le Baron]

As a young teenage boy I felt compelled to take French. This was not a requirement by the school system but rather a hormonal need. The French teacher was in her twenties, blonde, beautiful and dressed in a manner which practically demanded attendance by all male students and probably the faculty as well.

I learnt about 4 words in French in school but that class was my favourite.

This is by default one of the correct answers. My German teacher was Miss Jones, who looked like a middle-class librarian (navy blue pleated skirt), with perfect skin, dark hair and blue eyes. I imagine a psychiatrist could make something of this vivid memory.

[Khayyam]

It was garbage--as if it was designed to be as boring and hard to stomach as possible. And the tests did virtually nothing to measure actual ability. The fact that I took four years of French in high school and ended up with no French skills to speak of, but then later began reading books and listening to songs in German just for kicks and ended up being able to read Nietzsche and Goethe with no problem--that says everything, I think. I have this fantasy where I storm a high school foreign-language classroom and chloroform the teacher and lock them in the closet, and then start playing Rammstein. (Which would make a cool Rammstein video, come to think of it.)

Edit: but I'd temporarily let them out of the closet whenever it was time to teach cases and grammar, 'cause I still suck at that.