I came to primary teaching via an unorthodox route, following a longish stint as a university lecturer. Over the past 10 years I have found the optimal environment for sharing my love of languages with pupils in the independent sector. On the one hand, you have the chance to teach those who are readiest to learn (in small, well resourced classes). On the other hand, there is nothing clipping your wings. You can fly as high as you like, and the children will fly along with you. It is the ideal blend of freedom and responsibility, with the only absolute imperative being that you have got to make it work.
A language can be learned at any age and is always a valuable experience. But the younger you are when you start, the more likely you will learn just as you learned your mother tongue, through contact and osmosis. It has been said that babies are born with the capacity to learn any and as many languages as they hear around them; in the first four months they even recognise sounds and songs heard in the womb. By the age of six months, decline has set in and children start to narrow down the options. By secondary school, when the brain no longer has the same facility to reinvent itself, they find themselves resorting to language learning strategies instead.
There are several reasons for this precocious aptitude. Most importantly, language learning is what young humans do – it is one of the first skills they acquire along with learning to walk. The need to communicate is supported by exceptional plasticity in the infant brain, making the return on investment proportionately greater and mapping out pathways for future learning. Add to this a natural open mindedness, an innate willingness to play the game, and you have an unmissable opportunity to inspire a generation of future polyglots. Refreshingly, young children rarely ask what the point is, but relish the strangeness of a new language for its own sake, for the whiff of secret codes and adventure.
Recent research in the US shows that the sheer number of words addressed to children in the pre-school years by adults and siblings (not electronic devices) is the single biggest factor in lifelong educational achievement. Multiply the languages and you add to the total. Even if at first progress for multilingual children is sometimes slower, the rewards will be richer over the longer term, paying off in cultural awareness, employability and all round academic success. Children accustomed to moving between languages are likely to prove agile thinkers and problem solvers too.
Independent schools have a tradition of respecting foreign languages, classical and modern, attributable in part to the importance accorded to English. The French novelist Stendhal wrote that the novel holds up a mirror to society; foreign languages fulfil a similar function. Learning another language allows us to see English from a different angle, to become archaeologists of language, exploring and excavating etymologies. Other languages get you thinking about language in general: at the micro level – parts of speech, the way they hook up together and why this matters; and at the macro level – other languages mean new ways of seeing and describing the world. Language learning frees us from fixed patterns of speech and fixed patterns of thought, shakes things up and feeds the imagination.
Protected from the historical uncertainties of the state sector, independent schools have been free not only to introduce new languages such as Chinese and Arabic, but to develop new approaches to teaching as well. And they have instinctively recognised the natural affinity between linguistic competence and the critical life skills of social responsibility and leadership. A leader must be an effective user of language (better still, languages), sensitive to semantics, tone and register. But more than winning hearts and minds, this is about developing empathy, rejecting a monolithic view of culture and embracing a pluralistic reality: different words, different customs, the same common humanity. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that “the limits of our language are the limits of our world”. By learning other languages, we multiply the number of people across the world with whom we can communicate and cooperate.
In the examinable curriculum, languages are a highly academic discipline, a key indicator of intellectual potential. But for me, at primary level, languages should be treated first and foremost as a medium of communication. Language is part of what we are and in everything we do. It is not a separate subject. It is all subjects – just try imagining a subject without language. It makes no difference whether it’s familiar or foreign. Perro is as valid a sign for British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s “canoid patch of colour” as dog or chien or Hund. So if you want children to learn a new language, you have to find ways of normalising it, using it to do what English does.
The way we achieve this at St Faith’s School is by integrating our second language into the curriculum and embedding it in the community. Spanish is used in tutor times and assemblies, for notices and birthdays, in maths, personal, social, health and citizenship education (PSHCE) and PE. The school sings in both languages, and both are used in everyday greetings. Not only do we teach Spanish in language lessons, dissecting it under the analytical microscope, but we also use it to teach history, geography and religious studies. Very quickly, the children accept this new way of working: learning comes just as naturally, but is enhanced by an alternative point of view, a new set of images and expressions. Their understanding of the Spanish Armada, for example, is deeper and more nuanced.
At primary level, every interaction matters. However small the step, it makes a big difference. The requirement of academic rigour is no less than at university, but the need to be responsive and resourceful is far greater. Instil linguistic confidence in children and it will stay with them for life, like learning to swim or ride a bicycle. My own as yet unfulfilled dream? To hear one of my pupils doing a match commentary on Radio Marca. ¡Goooooool!
Dr Heather Martin is head of languages and enrichment at St Faith’s Independent Prep School in Cambridge and a modern foreign languages subject leader for the IAPS.
Content on this page is provided and funded by The Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS), supporter of the “Working in independent schools” series.
