It’s summer term: season of exams, light evenings and – for many year 12s – university open days. With fashionable courses from psychology to sports science beckoning, how many applicants will resist their lure and choose those beleaguered Cinderella subjects, languages?
On current trends, few. The story of the decline of modern languages in UK universities is as familiar as the fact that Madame Marsaud was always dans la cuisine in the textbooks: the numbers taking modern foreign language degree courses fell 16% between 2007-08 and 2013-14.
The numbers stabilised last year, yet a new blow seems to land weekly: this month, the OCR exam board announced it is to discontinue GCSEs and A-levels in French, German and Spanish. The latest annual Language Trends report, meanwhile, found schools are not preparing for more GCSE or A-level language entries despite the new Ebacc – intended to see 90% of pupils take a suite of five core GCSEs including a language by 2020.
With school languages deep in the doldrums, and new initiatives, including primary school language study, yet to feed through, what can universities do to keep departments viable and the subjects alive? If students with language skills are no longer there, where can teaching the subject even begin?
One answer, it appears, is at the beginning. Though it’s difficult to detect in admissions statistics, university language courses are changing, with more opportunities for students to study a language from scratch. Ab initio courses, as they are termed, once the preserve of Russian, Chinese and Arabic, are now being extended to include more familiar languages: Spanish, sometimes French and especially German. In some universities, such courses are long established, but others are making new forays: Oxford offered beginners’ German for the first time this year (available in joint honours to students with an A-level in another language); King’s College London, went further and this year offered German from scratch with a range of subjects. Manchester has introduced French from scratch – plus the chance to add a language as a minor degree subject.
For Lauren Valentine, 19, completing the first year of a single honours French degree at Manchester, the university’s new “flexible honours” programme has allowed her to fulfil her dream of learning Spanish, foiled when her school split her year into two random language groups and she ended up with French. “I was always embarrassed on family holidays when all I could say was una cola lite,” she says. “I couldn’t do Spanish at sixth-form college either, and I didn’t have the confidence to apply for joint honours with Spanish ab inito because I thought it wouldn’t ever be as good as my French.
“We did a lot of intensive grammar in the first year, and I feel that my Spanish is now above A-level standard, though the vocab will take more time to bed in. The course has given me even more than I’d hoped, and I now want to go into translation or interpreting.”
The new Manchester programme, introduced this year and allowing students to take a “minor” in a range of subjects including languages, is designed to catch students who might not have considered languages, or perhaps lacked the confidence to apply to study them at degree level. While the university still demands at least one good language A-level for traditional joint honours language courses, the minor courses require no prior language experience. This year, 30 out of 53 students taking a minor chose a language, and the vast majority plan to carry on – with a few even switching to full joint honours.
The scheme allows students to “dip their toe in the subject” for a year without risk, says assistant undergraduate director, Joseph McGonagle, and if they do continue they can get a language on their degree certificate. “The feedback is brilliant – they are grabbing it with both hands.” The hope is to double the numbers this September, he says. “This is about rebuilding from a low base – or a different base. We can’t let the popularity of school languages decline and not address that at university level.”
Meanwhile at Southampton, another Russell Group institution with a languages focus, ab initio courses are longer established. As in most language departments, they have an equality function, ensuring linguists who were able to take only one language in the sixth form can still take a traditional joint honours language degree, according to professor of modern languages Vicky Wright. Roughly 10% of applications for a combined degree are from applicants with only one language, though it was almost a quarter this year for French and Spanish because Spanish – although growing in popularity – is still often not available in schools at A-level, and even French is now not always on offer.
George Hope, 22, took only French at A-level, despite German being available. But when the language bug struck he applied to take French with accelerated German ab initio at Southampton, and fell in love with the “orderly, structured” language, spending his gap year in Freiburg and reaching a level equal to his French.
At the moment, he believes, ab initio options are recognised only by those who are “looking at languages already, so it isn’t really helping revive languages. But it could, if you encourage people applying to university, and say have you thought about languages alongside your main subject?”
At Southampton and many universities, the traditional ab initio option combining a new language with a known one may not be converting those who haven’t considered languages, but it does help counteract the effect of declining school language teaching. The dual language A-level student is “an endangered species”, according to McGonagle but, says Wright, “against a national trend of steady decline, we are holding our own but not increasing”.
At Oxford, ab initio German introduced this year has proved popular, and nine students are signed up for September (compared with 70 who have German A-level). Beginner students are taught very intensively and therefore their numbers will, for now, be capped at 16, says Katrin Kohl, professor of German literature.
The new course, Kohl notes, has attracted students drawn to German in diverse ways: perhaps through an interest in the economy, through family connections, or after reading something influential.
Jocelyn Wyburd, chair of the university council of modern languages and director of the language centre at Cambridge, sees the expansion of ab initio as “universities grappling with a pipeline problem” – a “woeful” 48% of the GCSE cohort last year took at least one language.
A strong fight back by language departments, mainly through the Routes into Languages campaign, plus government initiatives, may ultimately see a turnround in language take-up in the UK. But for now, Wyburd says, universities are “reinventing their rules. Each department is devising its own pathways and constantly reviewing what are the non-negotiables.”
Can ab initio rescue languages? “It can. Will it? I don’t know – I’d love it to. But it’s not a panacea.”
