Countries with the Best Foreign Language Education

[tarvos]

Cavesa wrote a pretty thorough response that points out a lot of the relevant mechanisms and I agree with it entirely. I only have some minor points to add from my personal experience of having learned languages in Germany. There I was pretty much tortured with grammar translation only, with very little speaking in class, and to be quite frank with you, this is exactly the reason why I have such a high level of English. I learned it before all this fancy interaction stuff and was dealing mainly with fill in the gaps exercises, endless drills, endless vocabulary lists, dragon like teachers who were scary enough to make us do our homework and so on. At some point I also broke my leg and because I was so insanely bored sitting at home, I actually did all my English grammar exercises because those were more interesting than daytime TV. Our parents also tried to trick us into learning more by buying us language learning software for DOS! This software didn't even have a graphical user interface and those were simply more fill in the gap grammar exercises. I loved computers, so I actually spent hours with this. None of that dumbed down reception only Duolingo stuff, basically it was whole exercise books full of grammar exercises ported onto a computer. And then all our computer games were in English in general at the time, so we actually wanted to learn it. We went on school trips to England and when I was 14 my parents sent me to England for 3 weeks in the summer where I already ended up in the advanced class with kids who were much older. Not many kids want to spend their summer with more classes, but I loved it. So, for me, grammar translation was actually extremely effective and I'm glad I didn't have any of those modern dumbed down classes.

This mirrors my own experience with English, and that of my parents' generation with German and French. When I grew up in the 90s, getting English books in the Netherlands may have been possible, but it would have been expensive, and for some, prohibitively so. The beginning of the 90s we spent in Canada, so I got immersion there - and it was great. Once we moved back, my parents decided that letting such a skill go to waste would be silly, so on my dad's many business trips overseas to the States and Canada he always brought back books and video games in English. For Christmas, we had an exchange with friends of ours who lived in the States - they would send us English materials for our kids and we'd trade them Dutch materials for theirs. This is how my parents used to do it - and it was a very, very clever and effective way to do it - because my brother, who was 2 when we moved back, profited immensely from it. We went on several long trips to Canada and the US and we were enrolled in bilingual education in order to make sure we learned English well. It served both of us.

My parents' generation was inundated with boring grammar-based French and German (they were a bit lazier teaching us). My parents, to this day, can watch German television without a hitch! My parents don't remember much of their French, but whenever we went there as children, they had enough to navigate around, and enough to teach us how to use the basics, or to help us with revising French verbs for homework. My father's English is excellent, so he was able to revise essays and such with us for school as well.

To this day they don't have to use English when travelling to Germany unless my dad's on a business trip where he has to make a speech or something. We were simply shown how to use German while in Germany because my parents never spoke English when we went there. We were taught that using German was the norm.

That said, I also had a Latin course based on grammar translation and I made it a game to get As in my exams without actually learning anything. I simply wasn't interested in Latin and we all hated it. With Latin my language classes were a complete failure and many kids also came out of English class with absolutely no English whatsoever. I always thought that the English classes in Germany are fairly effective, because they definitely worked for me and my friends, but later I realised that a lot of people actually don't speak English at all in Germany. Some of my friends who didn't go to a school leading to higher education don't even understand slowly spoken dumbed down English! I figured this one out because a friend who didn't speak any German was met with a wall of helpless silence when we went to a concert with some of my German friends who didn't go to university. And in the end, if I can make it through 3 years of Latin with As without learning anything, other people may cheat their way through 5 or even 8 years of English classes.

My brother cheated his way through German too. He doesn't really speak German. It's a shame, because he was motivated to learn English and his level in that language is sky-high. He says it's because he's bad at languages, but you can't be bad at languages and speak English as well as he does :/ The modern teaching system has gone soft on German and French, and has really upped the ante on the English (results of teenagers and people my generation speaking English are generally great. There are very many people nowadays with good levels of English and minor accents. Standards have been raised).

That said, I also know plenty of youth who have learned other languages to a good degree and almost all of them needed it for work.

[blaurebell]

I'm sure English is an exception due to how omnipresent it is globally, but I met a girl from Luxembourg when I was in Paris that spoke English pretty perfectly, as well as Luxembourgish, German, and a good level of French. There is definitely something to be said for whatever they are doing over there!

All school is taught in Luxembourgish and German in primary school and in secondary school they switch to all French with additional English classes. In some schools you can also choose another language, so you end up with 2+ languages spoken at native or almost native level, +2 at an excellent level. And if you're not a Luxembourgish, German or French native speaker, you might still get another one for free. There are quite a number of Portuguese native speakers in the country for example. One of the factors is also that pretty much all media is in different languages and that they have almost all their classes in a foreign language, not just 2h a week or something like that. Depending on the family they will also watch mostly German or mostly French TV, and they tend to read a mix of stuff. Books in Luxembourgish only have been around a short while, maybe 30 years and children learn to read in German first. It's an interesting system and the reason for it is simple: Luxembourgish is a tiny language with little content and the country is so small that more than half of the students go to university in a different country. After a multilingual school education and 5 years of university education in Germany, France or England they end up with at least 2 languages at near native level.

[Chung]

I'm sure English is an exception due to how omnipresent it is globally, but I met a girl from Luxembourg when I was in Paris that spoke English pretty perfectly, as well as Luxembourgish, German, and a good level of French. There is definitely something to be said for whatever they are doing over there!

bpasseri, "location, location, location" applies rather well to language learning too. For me it's been clear enough that day-to-day needs (perceived ones too) and motivation of the learners/students dwarf other factors, and it just doesn't seem that language pedagogy in Luxembourg is so much better/advanced than in other countries. I think that I would have otherwise heard sooner or later something about a putative "Luxembourgish method" from my Czech, French, German, Polish or Ukrainian instructors.

[rdearman]

grammar translation was actually extremely effective

Sorry, but what exactly is this process. Having never had the opportunity to do any language learning in school I'm not sure what you mean.

[blaurebell]

Sorry, but what exactly is this process. Having never had the opportunity to do any language learning in school I'm not sure what you mean.

Usually it's a mix of fill-in-the-gaps exercises for grammar and lots of them, making you write down conjugations over and over, and they also make you translate sentences or whole passages of teaching texts from L2 to L1. Usually prose rather than dialogues. It's the traditional method of teaching Latin, a good old fashioned 19th century method. Chorusing conjugations and declinations with the whole class for Latin. The only difference for English was that there was less chorusing and the teacher also called on students to translate from L1 to L2, sometimes on the blackboard in writing, sometimes spoken. Also, they made us read out loud, which was horrific since everyone in class had a terrible saxony accent. The equivalent of a "playful" approach would be to let everyone in class get up and then prompt vocabulary, the one who gets it right first can sit down. Believe me, nobody wants to stand up for 20min at 7.30 am, until you got through a class of 30! And I was usually one of the last to sit down because my brain simply doesn't work at that hour. So even the "games" were torture. And of course, the invariable vocabulary test one week, grammar test the next week, vocabulary test, grammar test and so on. At some point they started with writing exercises too. A description of a picture, telling a story from a series of pictures, answering questions about a text.

The progression with Latin doesn't involve production, they just give you Caesar and Cicero to translate and a dictionary. The teaching texts were at least about Roman history or legends, not so bad, but Caeser and Cicero are immensely dry and boring. The method usually leads to intense hatred - pupils hating teachers for the torture, teachers hating pupils for being inept and lazy, everyone hating the subject, etc. The Latin class of a friend of mine actually celebrated getting their Latinum with a good old-fashioned book burning. I found that totally offensive, but well ... Germans! They probably got the idea from history class

In English class we occasionally got to watch Mr Bean and they took us on trips or to the theatre a few times, so that was not quite as "torture only". And at some point the grammar torture stopped - there isn't enough English grammar to fill 8 years of classes! At that point they made us read and watch stuff or have discussions about pollution or CCTV or stuff like that. My Abitur in English actually involved Shakespeare too, so they expect a pretty high level of comprehension. At that point our essays also had to be stylistically good, so making grammar mistakes in an Abitur level class was pretty much a reason for failing entirely. Some people got Cs on these essays even after having gone abroad to the US for a year, so years 12-13 were full of pretty difficult stuff. But then most people don't take that class, it's only those who choose English as one of their two main Abitur exams. I think they don't make regular students in the 2h a week class go through Shakespeare.

[Cavesa]

Why do you always blame the grammar method, which is no longer used in most cases? Actually, the important factor now are the shortcomings of the communicative method.

Ok, schools (in the UK at least - can't speak for anywhere else) don't use 'The Grammar Method' but they are grammar heavy...if that makes sense ? So it's not just out and out grammar like public schoolkids used to get for Latin, but there is still far too much emphasis on grammar points to explain concepts the students haven't been exposed to.

I've seen various approaches being used. From the traditional that a minority of teachers still uses (some with great results, others not), through the combinations (an exceptional teacher getting the advantages of both approaches, a worse or a bad one confusing students with a chaos of grammar book copies on top of their course, without any clear sense of progress or system, without the bigger picture), to the purely "modern" way without "bothering" students(I have seen it fail on high school students, who were unable to put together a sentence after two years and got the idea that learning German was just memorisation. But it is even worse at primary schools, since the ESL system believes children are stupid and must feel like just playing at the expense of efficiency, which of course annoys some of the children too). Th

The real problem is trying to teach languages to kids who have no interest in learning languages, much less in the culture of the country of the language they're expected to learn. Languages in school, as proven by the dismal results, are nothing more than box-ticking exercises and a huge waste of time. They should be optional - then kids who really want to learn will learn.

1.Many are not interested in history or maths. Some couldn't care less even whether they learn to read or not. While I am all for individualisation of education and allowing people to choose their preferences as much as possible, some of general knowledge should be required.
2.Language learning is not only important as a way to make people think about other cultures and people, which is probably the more important part in the anglophone countries, but for the rest of us it is necessary. In non-anglophone countries, you either learn a language or you get a huge disadvantage at the job market. The opportunities for monolinguals are shrinking. The UK is the exception here, not an example of the general rule.
3.Language learning in schools is part of politics, not only in the way of choosing a language based on the relations with the particular country. Obligatory language learning is one of the clearest signal to the whole population: "Hey, you are not the center of the universe, and you are to learn about others too." This is not an attack on English natives, too many czechs are in desperate need of such a lesson too. It gives freedom, as people can move abroad, or read foreign media. When it comes to individual freedom, freedom of expression, thinking, movement which are important european values (and not only european), language learning is the key tool to promote it and allow people to fully and responsibly use their rights in any way they see fit. It is no secret that every closed totalitarian country sees language learning as a potentially dangerous activity.

Why would social background matter in this day and age where information is available to anybody ? The drive of the person to actually become and remain interested in a language is the only factor that matters. Social status, money, education etc is all irrelevant. Yes it's true that people from 'higher' status backgrounds are more likely to learn languages to higher levels but that is despite their social status not because of it. It's an indicator of desire to learn but not an absolute. What i mean by this is that anyone from any walk of life can achieve the same in their language learning irrespective of social status or wealth.

It is extremely relevant. Again, you are focusing that being an English native is a situation completely different than that of majority of people.
1.Education and social status are important in the motivation of students. A kid with loving parents, who are however not too educated, do manual jobs, and their free time spend with tv, is simply highly unlikely to just get interested and active about learning on their own. Going to school and having a foreign language among the obligatory subjects is the best chance for the kid to make up for their disadvantage.

2.Money is extremely important. The English based internet is filled with free and cheap resources, and we could talk a long time about their varying quality, the Spanish or French internet less so, and good luck learning your first foreign language this way as a Hungarian native. libraries are not that well stocked, especially in small towns. And there are simply many people who have a hard time self studying. And don't forget we are talking about kids here. No, a 12 year old Czech native is not likely to learn a language on their own and cheaply without school. Many responsible parents pay extra books, private classes, private teachers, long stays abroad, and they know why they are investing so much money. Kids with parents on minimum wage have only school as their opportunity to get over this handicap, learn a language for their CV, get a better job thanks to it, and one day be significantly richer than their parents.

3."Despite their social status and not because of it" means you are not reflecting the extreme priviledge of English natives and of a few more languages. In non anglophone countries, a language brings money. Be an English monolingual, and the whole world is open to you, and you can fully use your social status and education and profit from it, foreigners will compete for your attention and show of their skills. Be a something else monolingual and who cares, you either speak English/language of your business partner or employer, or you are out of luck, as your opportunities will have to fit within your language zone.

Also, all schools in the UK at least that i know of teach the same or similar curriculum when it comes to languages. I know people who went to grammar schools and people who went to schools full of poor people and they all failed to learn languages to any decent standard because they weren't interested in learning them. They passed the tests and then moved on with their lives.

What is so shocking about that? So many people just passed their geography or physics tests and moved on on with their lives. It was their decision, whether or not to get good at something (and you usually have to get good by mostly or fully self studying no matter the subject, I had had to study the whole physics again on my own, before applying for university, because one of my teachers had been burnt out and the other totally incompetent, it is not just about the languages). It was their choice whether or not to use their knowledge, to study it, use it for jobs, to cherish it as a useful part of their general education, or to merrily forget it all. Still, noone suggests cutting chemistry or humanities out of the curriculum.

The original question which countries or whether any countries teach languages well in the main education system is an extremely valid one.And we all agree that all the systems leave a lot to be desired, with good outcome being rather the exception than the norm. I am quite sure to say that we would have gotten similar, but hopefully somewhat better answers had we been discussing maths teaching. Yet, for some reason, noone would suggest that maths should not be taught at all. For everyone except the anglophones, it is just as important for their future careers. For anglophones, it is less important in this area (even though it can be a big advantage), the importance of getting interested in the cultural aspects and respect towards others may be even more crucial. Anglophone kids do not have the natural source of education about foreign cultures in form of foreign tv series and movies and such stuff, they have everything served on the silver platter. No pressure there. School is probably the only opportunity to apply such pressure and try to ignite some interest before they get too old to care.

[Cavesa]

Sorry, but what exactly is this process. Having never had the opportunity to do any language learning in school I'm not sure what you mean.

Usually it's a mix of fill-in-the-gaps exercises for grammar and lots of them, making you write down conjugations over and over, and they also make you translate sentences or whole passages of teaching texts from L2 to L1. Usually prose rather than dialogues. It's the traditional method of teaching Latin, a good old fashioned 19th century method. Chorusing conjugations and declinations with the whole class for Latin. The only difference for English was that there was less chorusing and the teacher also called on students to translate from L1 to L2, sometimes on the blackboard in writing, sometimes spoken. Also, they made us read out loud, which was horrific since everyone in class had a terrible saxony accent. The equivalent of a "playful" approach would be to let everyone in class get up and then prompt vocabulary, the one who gets it right first can sit down. Believe me, nobody wants to stand up for 20min at 7.30 am, until you got through a class of 30! And I was usually one of the last to sit down because my brain simply doesn't work at that hour. So even the "games" were torture. And of course, the invariable vocabulary test one week, grammar test the next week, vocabulary test, grammar test and so on. At some point they started with writing exercises too. A description of a picture, telling a story from a series of pictures, answering questions about a text.

From my experience, it can include a lot of translation to the foreign language, any other types of grammar exercises than just fill ins, and our drilling games were better than standing up endlessly so early in the morning . We were getting points for correct answers plus other activites in class, there were various mechanisms of such games, and the people with the most got a sticker on the cover of their notebook. Everyone had a collection, some smaller some bigger, but no kid was totally failing these games all the time, so it was pretty fun. We got solid basics for the level, we were able to make our own sentences, we knew what we were learning, and it definitely didn't mean not talking in class. Every week, one of the classes (Wednesdays, I still remember it) was meant as practice, with using what we have learnt, with examples, and exactly what the "conversational" method tries to do. And we were well prepared, thanks to the more grammar and vocab based rest of the classes.

When I compare this experience of 10 year old me in the 90's with the recent experience of my young sister that I've personally witnessed in class, the "progress" in language teaching is very sad. I've seen four teachers of hers, all natives, all supposedly awesome, if you looked at their CVs. None was explaining grammar, so the kids didn't understand the logic and just were trying to correctly repeat after teachers. None of the teachers was able to use the friendly competition mechanisms, which was horrible. One of the fastest ways to annoy and bore children is inventing a points collecting game, be unfair in awards, use it to punish the kids (and for nothing else than trying to be active and participate more in class), and then not even finish it. And the children were bored. While we used to both translate things and also have some interaction based on that, these kids were forced to extremely dull "interactions" or just to listen to the teacher, because they were not equiped for anything better. We used to have interesting texts and dialogues in our old school textbooks with just a few images per lesson. They had tons of pictures and dull "comics" with just a few lines of dialogue. We used to have normal grades and a textbook any parent could look to and see what was being taught. They had a primitive Cambridge exam, that was so easy it was demotivating as even a pet stone could have probably gotten full score, and a "coursebook" giving very little clue to anyone wishing to help the child study.

And what I have just described cannot be dismissed by my sister having worse educated teachers or something like that. I had czechs at that stage only, she got natives. I had older books, with some pages updated and sticked in (those in units about Czechoslovakia and the USSR), she had expensive books by a famous and revered publisher. Back in 90's, supplementary material or culture was not available on every corner plus the internet. Now it is.

With systematic and quite grammar heavy method and practice, we had good active and passive skills. CEFR wasn't used back then, but I think we truly were at full A1 or halfway to A2 at the age of eleven, after three years of French classes. My sister and her classmates (not counting those from bilingual families), at the same age and having had five years of English classes (some seven, having started as preschoolers), had good listening (A2 or some perhaps even B1). Generally extremely poor reading comprehension (except for her, she is reading in English, as she refused to wait for a Harry Potter translation like I had refused ages ago) and no ability to read even known stuff out loud correctly, very poor speaking despite quite good pronunciation (isolated words, no ability to form sentences), and absolutely no writing. All their writing were very few fill in the gap exercises, otherwise they were not writing at all, they didn't even have vocabulary notebooks, nothing.

The problem for my French learning started with changing school, private tutors, classes, a gap, starting again and again. And a huge part of the problem was the transfer from the "grammar method" to the "communication method", I was not progressing. To chaotic coursebooks, teachers not pushing students to drills, to huge piles of copies from workbooks impossible to not get confused in. The choice of self study resources was very limited, internet was just beginning. But still, when I finally got a good teacher again, it didn't help much, because it took my classmates too many years to catch up.

[zenmonkey]

Why would social background matter in this day and age where information is available to anybody ? The drive of the person to actually become and remain interested in a language is the only factor that matters. Social status, money, education etc is all irrelevant. Yes it's true that people from 'higher' status backgrounds are more likely to learn languages to higher levels but that is despite their social status not because of it. It's an indicator of desire to learn but not an absolute. What i mean by this is that anyone from any walk of life can achieve the same in their language learning irrespective of social status or wealth.

While this may be true of an individual the fact remains that the influence of background significantly drives achievement. Some people become famous mathematicians despite a very hard start and difficult economic or social background. But despite that innate potential - more often than not hard times will knock the math or language out of one's grasp. It isn't just drive - while it might be the most important factor for some situations - many people learn languages as accidental tourists in the language landscape.
I was learning French at the age of 6 months because of my privilege to be born to a family that traveled and that had a rich language background. 95%+ of the people from my country will not have the opportunity to travel to France for extended periods of time that assisted in the mastery of the language.

But it is just a fact that information is not equally available to all, that intellectual pursuit and the use of leisure time are modified by familial attitudes and background and, in large numbers, the social pressures of certain economic, social, geographic groups are likelier to learn languages. And in the western world those languages learned will continue to be more focused to economic potential and privilege languages.

[PeterMollenburg]

Second language education in school is actually really really bad and I know that up until at least 10 years ago it wasn't even compulsory (edit: in compulsory school).

Language is interesting, is it not? The use of a single word above, for me, changes the whole tone of your comments above. Bolding and red colour my addition btw, if anyone's wondering. I find 'even' gives your comments and opinion a tone of 'like get with the program Norway, wtf, why wasn't English compulsory already, much earlier?'. And of course if ppl on this forum know me well, such expectations, although I entirely understand the motives, don't sit well with me. If only you were saying the same thing for another language, perhaps neighbouring language, or geographically closer than the UK, like Swedish, Dutch, German, Danish etc. Don't feel compelled to react to this, this is not a judgement of character, I can assure you, I'm just noting my own thoughts here and wondering about social and political movements behind such 'expectations', if you will.

Actually, Tillumadoguenirurm actually talks about any second language education, not just English. An easy mistake to make as the preceding sentence was about why so many Norwegian's are proficient in English (hence why I isolated the sentence above).

Elenia is right, I meant any second language.

Cool, I'm happy to be wrong, actually This also shows how biased I am by my own conclusions and beliefs. I'm seeing things that aren't there when I think they are. I can't be a real PM can I?

[blaurebell]

From my experience, it can include a lot of translation to the foreign language, any other types of grammar exercises than just fill ins, and our drilling games were better than standing up endlessly so early in the morning .

You forget that Prussians invented the German school system and they did not believe in fun Besides, competition? Trying to get us out of our apathetic slumber was no mean feat and was usually achieved by a whole lot of shouting and threats, rather than any sort of "psychological" method of trying to motivate us. But then, I'm mainly speaking about East Germany here, in the 90s we didn't have an awful lot of good teachers left and they weren't hiring any new ones either because like 25% of the population left from one year to the next. And of course the teachers had a sort of "no future" attitude, because any school might close due to lack of students and then they would be unemployed without the possibility of finding a new job. In a working class town that turned into an unemployed town from one year to the next! Bleak times, bleak times. Sounds like in your parts you weren't hit so hard?

I totally know what you mean with the communicative approach ... my Spanish still suffers from that malady, although I'm now trying to counteract that with grammar grammar and more grammar.