Learning To Listen, Listening To Learn

This post isn’t about listening. It isn’t even about teaching French, specifically. It’s about teaching languages to students whose first language is English - particularly but not exclusively in the UK / English setting; but I think the same arguments would apply to most monolingual English-speaking nations. In fact the same arguments might well apply to teaching non-English in non-English speaking nations too (ie teaching German in Spain or France; teaching French in Germany, etc.) It goes like this: Framing language learning as ‘useful for our future’ As we worry about the slow decline of language learning in the UK, the favoured refrain about WHY kids should learn other languages seems to be one of utility: it’ll get you a better job. It’ll get you into a better university. People ‘with another language’ (whatever that means) earn x% more per year. Even the Guardian article discussing this year’s Language Trends report inferred that key reasons to learn a language were related to...

My year 10 Germanists have their listening mock exam tomorrow, so they wanted to ‘do listening’ today. Poor sods not knowing this is my absolute favourite subject! We worked through some exam strategies for a couple of questions from the AQA Sample 2 (they’re doing Sample 1 for the exam and I hope that they will have forgotten them by the time they do Sample 2 in the winter!). Then I thought: dictation! That’s actually the issue, isn’t it? From the exam perspective there’s a lot less room for making an educated guess, but also my gut feeling is that it would tell me a lot more about their experience of processing audio input in German.  Here are the sentences they heard: 1 Man muss sich / im Urlaub / entspannen. (one must relax oneself on holiday) 2 Nächstes Jahr / werde ich / Abitur machen. (next year I will do A levels) 3 Wir haben / gestern / Trauben gegessen. (we have eaten grapes yesterday) Because we were doing exam practice I started by keeping it as close as possible to the...