FRENCH President Nicolas Sarkozy outlined a plan for the country’s educational reform recently, stressing the need to produce more bilingual students, according to the Associated Press.
Students in French public schools begin to study a second language in middle school and often receive up to six years of foreign language instruction. Still, many high school graduates struggle to express even the simplest thought in English, Spanish, German or other foreign languages.
Sarkozy said French students needed to become at least bilingual or trilingual and underscored that “a foreign language is meant to be spoken.” He suggested language instruction should be shifted away from written grammar and memorization to emphasize oral skills. Besides a curriculum heavy on grammar, another stumbling block is the teachers themselves. Many are not native speakers of the languages they teach, and have strong French accents. Sarkozy pledged to change the way foreign language learning is evaluated, to bring more native speakers into schools and to encourage French youths to study abroad.
