What is language education for? Perhaps to answer that question we need to look at what language is for. To communicate, right? Well maybe, but that’s not even half the story of what language is for, if we think about it a little more.
How do you win an argument? How do you relax with friends? How do you climb the social ladder, or navigate office politics? How many of us have developed an affinity with Italy, or with France or Germany or Spain or China, after studying a language in school and sometimes liking it? How do you think deeply about something you care about, or how do you rehearse an important conversation?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, think how versatile you need to be to have those thousand words in the first place.
In short, language is at the very heart of what it means to be human. How on earth do you teach all that? By memorising a few verb lists, preparing for endless exams that test your precise knowledge of what your word classes are called and how they are formed? Or by memorising a few poems and what their significant language play has achieved? To use most toddlers’ favourite monosyllable: No.
I recently attended a local conference on immigration and education, where one of the recurring themes listed as a barrier to effective education and social integration was, unsurprisingly, language.
Everybody I spoke with or heard talk repeatedly insisted that children reaching Malta and starting school first needed intensive support in the languages of schooling, namely Maltese and English. Wisely, many school heads and college principals recognised that different catchment areas needed these two languages to varying degrees, and a few enlightened souls also reminded everybody that each child’s native language, whatever it was and wherever they hailed from, needed honouring too.
In short, those people on the ground, working daily with children, often understand the crucial need to equip children with whichever languages are going to best serve them in our society.
While the issue of how children access our education system if they don’t speak Maltese and English might be critical for our international students, many in education also argue that Maltese children have been suffering the same effects for a while. There are also Maltese-dominant speaking children who struggle with English and English-dominant speaking children struggling with Maltese. Teachers at all educational levels including tertiary have been battling along with these children too.
But the time has come to give people working so closely with children considerably more support than we have done, as a society, to date. It is not enough to leave it up to the goodwill of an individual teacher, or group of teachers, or even a more enlightened school, to recognise a problem with language education and try to fix it on a more or less reactive basis. We must be a little more pro-active as a society now. We need a holistic vision for language education, and we must find the funds to support the implementation of that vision.
Our vision needs to extend beyond assessment and exams, and it needs to carefully appreciate just how much of a multitasking tool language actually is. It also needs long-term planning that goes beyond our typical five-year electoral cycles.
For our vision to aim high enough, and still keep grounded, we must hold up a mirror to our society. How does our society thrive, and what do we want future generations to achieve? Probably there are no bounds to our ambitions. But for all of that, language must be well established.
And note this, it’s not a language we need to focus on, but language. In other words, we must nurture the human capacity for language, not just the learning by heart of the rules of one language.
The various rallying cries of “Learn Maltese, because we’re in Malta” vs “Learn English – who needs Maltese?” and so on completely miss the point. We need both, because both are widely used in all spheres of this society.
Our vision needs to extend beyond assessment and exams, and it needs to carefully appreciate just how much of a multitasking tool language actually is
We must also continue to nurture other languages too, because no, Google Translate cannot do it all and will not be able to for a while yet. And because many of our capable citizens will at some point push against the limits of their comfort zones and try a study or work stint abroad. You can sort of survive with just English in Belgium or Luxembourg or Germany, but because most Europeans are used to the benefits of multilingualism, they tend to pity those who “only” speak English.
Is our vision for our children so limited? The Maltese have always prided themselves on their ability to accommodate different languages, to be bi- if not multi-lingual. Now that language learning and teaching can be better supported by new technologies, it is hardly a good time to throw away that hard-earned talent.
The practicalities of nurturing a holistic, inclusive and versatile talent for language need not be that daunting. For a start, uncoupling successful language use from assessment and exams would be a step forward.
Assessment in language can only provide a snapshot of formalised standards attained, so it should never be treated as a goal in itself. Assessment is useful solely in issues of progression, or as means of proof of standards attained, but it’s not insurance for future language needs and situations. As many of us will remember, getting an A in French doesn’t always help when you’re in a village in France, trying to make sense of a menu in a restaurant.
This is why teachers ask parents to read with their children at home, and it is also why a languages curriculum needs room to expand beyond the confines of exam-oriented syllabi. If children have enough time to enjoy playing, or singing, or reading in two or more languages, the formal structures of essay writing, critical thinking and argumentation necessary for successful exam practice will at least have something to build on, some material to work with.
If we could agree on a vision – whatever it is – the rest will change to accommodate that vision. If parents want their children to thrive socially, they should have access to books, apps, podcasts and teachers to support them in both Maltese and English, and later, in foreign languages too; if teachers and educators feel that something is amiss in their language curricula they must voice their concerns and we should listen; if children are bored with some forms of language learning, but stimulated by others, we must take note, and change; if our syllabi are too content-laden, or too dull and uninspired, they should be changed.
If this all seems like stating the obvious, that’s because it is obvious that we must act, as the constant refrain of evidence of poor language skills in exams, higher education and employment reminds us.
The responsibilities and practicalities of realising a more ambitious vision for language education, where, by the end of compulsory education, our children are multilingual to varying degrees, are perhaps difficult to conceive. But if we establish a good vision I suspect that little by little, the implementation of it will come together. With no vision, we will continue to muddle along, reacting to one crisis after another, exhausting and wasting our precious resources.
Sarah Grech is a linguist with teaching and research interests in language teaching, language identities and social variation in languages.