Here, oral English teaching starts already in first grade primary school. Simple things, like counting etc. Some time around third/fourth grade, the kids are also beginning to learn written English. Then they’re taught a second foreign language in middle school. We can choose a third one in high school, but that’s usually not obligatory.
In my time (the 70s), we started with English in third grade.
ETA: We also get an “immersion” type of learning experience through movies, TV shows and computer games (foreign-language movies and TV shows are subtitled, not dubbed*). I’ve noticed that computer games are quite useful for today’s kids for learning even more English than we did.
Talking about dubbing, I was amazed when I saw “Mad Max” on DVD. The movie actually had one Australian (original) soundtrack, and one American English. Is Australian English that difficult to understand for an American? :eek:
In Germany it’s done at the secondary school level, which in my days lasted from grade 5 (the first secondary school grade after four years of elementary school) through grade 13, when the final secondary school diploma (Abitur) is earnt. English was not my first foreign language (that was Latin, which I studied throughout the nine years of secondary school). I could have started English at grade 5, but didn’t, starting it only at grade 7. I could have dropped English after grade 11, but didn’t and kept it up to my Abitur in grade 13.
There is now a tendency to start earlier with teaching English to children; some, but not very many, primary schools do it. It’s mostly still a secondary school thing, but it has become the first foreign language almost universally - while many Gymnasien (not a place for exercise but a particular type of secondary school in Germany) still teach Latin, it is becoming rare to do Latin as a first foreign language, most people starting with English.
Until recently, I was convinced that it was not possible nowadays to get a school education in Germany without studying English, but then I met a guy (highly educated, works as a lawyer in an international organisation) who had not learnt English at school - he did French Latin, and Ancient Greek instead, learning English at university. That is the absolute exception, however, and I was quite surprised evading English entirely swas possible at a German school.
Note, however, that much language learning does not take place in classrooms but in cinemas and in front of TVs. That actually gives us Germans quite a disadvantage compared to many other nations in Europe - foreign films and TV shows are universally dubbed in the German-speaking countries.
I was surprised, too, when I first saw this movie on TV in its dubbed form. I think it was more of a marketing thing… not being sure how the Aussie accent would be received in the US at the time. Today, that would never happen.
In the Netherlands, when I attended - from 1986 - English, French and German were required classes in the first three years of high school (age 12 to 14). You were also required to keep at least one foreign language for the full length of high school. “Gymnasium” students in my school could also take Latin and classical Greek from the second year on.
AFAIK, there’s more attention to English now in middle schools (I think it was very rare back then to have any foreign language classes in middle school at all).
ETA: about dubbing; in the Netherlands it’s extremely rare to have dubbing on anything except TV shows and movies for the under-10-ish kids and some cartoons. You’re expected to be able to read subtitles.
Yes, they teach foreign languages much younger now. Last month, my husband and I visited three elementary schools while choosing a school for our two and a half year old. The teachers who gave us the tour of their school said they nowadays take advantage of how young children naturally can pick up several languages when they are about 5-6 years old, so they started teaching them English (or, in one school, additional French and German) at that age. In a playful method.
In the French system, you start your first foreign language course (almost always English, but I had a pal for example that took German as first foreign language) when you enter high school (called “college” here), that is normally at 11. I just cant remember how many hours we were supposed to be doing per week, it must have been more than two hours but I dont recall exactly how much.
If you graduated normally (that is not doubling classes because of too shitty marks), at 13, you’d start you second foreign language (usually Spanish). So by the end of high school you’d have studied 4 years of first foreign language, and two of second foreign language.
Then, most people go to “lycée”, which is the school right after “college” (some people drop out at this point as school is no longer mandatory when you’re 16, others opt for “professional lycées” that have more focus on practical skills and less on general education, so I guess language studies tend to take a back seat).
In “lycée” you keep your foreign language choices and keep studying them for three more years until the Bac, which is the general admission test at the end of your studies (a diploma wothless by itself but mandatory to get into college).
So, in the end , if you havent doubled any classes, you’d do seven years of first foreign language, and five of secondary foreign language. As I said I’m not certain I remember correctly but I think, even when you study your two languages you have more hours for your ffl than you sfl.
The usual choices tended to be English-Spanish, but if you wanted to get into good classes (that is classes whith good students, and thus with a more demanding level) you’d go for German instead of Spanish (with a side dish of Latin if your school had that).
Now that was during my time, a little less than twenty years ago. Even then started to appear more choices in foreign languages. There were some Arab or Portuguese classes (obviously because those are two big minorities in France). You could also opt for regional languages in some parts of France (like Corsican or Breton, very useful).
The end result is still petty much disastrous, I remember in my final year there (so after seven years of English) one student was amazed that I was reading a magazine in English. After seven years he still couldnt, but mostly wasnt that interested. And when I got in college it wasnt that much better.
Also, we have special classes to teach us how to pretend (almost convincingly but with a touch of bad faith, guile, and arrogance thrown in) to any English speaker in France that “No, we dont speak English”. It’s mandatory, failure to present yourself can result in being sent to Socialist work camps.
In Romania, kids start learning the first foreign language (which is usually English) in the second grade, when they are 7-8 years old, and the second foreign language (French or German, usually), in the 6th grade. They continue learning the two languages until the 12th grade, when they graduate from high school. That’s how it was in the early 90s, anyway. Nowadays some kids start learning the first foreign language in kindergarten.
We don’t have any dubbed movies, and 10-20 years ago, all the children’s channels were in English (no dubbing, no subtitles), which was very useful for many people in my generation. So if you watched cartoons, you were bound to pick up some things.
I don’t remember learning any spelling rules like “i before e, except after c”… We learned by heart the correct spelling and pronunciation for every word. I think we were supposed to be taught British English, but it wasn’t a very strict rule.
I remember that the first English words I learned were “cat”, “dog”, and “pan”.
Kids usually also have a year or so of Latin, in the 8th grade.
I’m American, and I taught English in a Bulgarian public school in a rural area from 2006 to 2008. Until a few years ago, students started taking a foreign language (usually English) in fifth grade (age 11). They changed this a few years back so that now they start in second grade (age 8). They add in a second language a couple years later. At my school, the two other language options besides English were German and Russian. Like I said, English was the most popular language - I like to think it was because they had an, ahem native speaker to teach it - and Russian was known as the easy language for lazy students.
The system is pretty terrible and in general does not do a very good job of actually teaching language skills. Kids from wealthier families who are motivated to have them learn languages send them to private language schools for after class lessons. Most of the Bulgarian teachers of English that I met have a very poor grasp of the language - my secondary job after teaching my own students was improving my counterpart’s language skills. I’ll give you an example: when I got to Bulgaria, the only tense she could use was the present simple. We would have conversations like this:
Her: I go to Stara Zagora.
Me: You’re going to Stara Zagora? When, this weekend?
Her: No, I go to Stara Zagora yesterday.
A lot of the time we spoke to each other in Bulgarian, and keep in mind that when she had been teaching English for about five years before I ever learned a word of Bulgarian.
But after about a year and a half of me yammering at her in English, she started using other tenses. It was a great moment in my life when I heard her use the past tense for the first time! :)
The problem is that English wasn’t a popular language during communist times and most adults in Bulgaria learned Russian as kids. There probably are enough people who do speak English today that they could fill all the available teachers’ positions, but they speak English as the result of an excellent education and they can get better jobs than teaching. (The introductory wage for teachers is 200 leva a month, the equivalent of 100 euros. Even in Bulgaria, this is abominably bad, way below a living wage.)
Good students can get into elite high schools that specialize in different topics. This includes language schools - I met some language school students who were studying English in Stara Zagora, the regional administrative center, and they had excellent language skills. I was really impressed! But these kids are in the minority.
I just checked with my daughter who is teaching English in Germany this year. At here school English basically starts in kindergarten, but it is not an official class with grades until the students are ten, about the fifth grade.
I think one reason Europeans do it better than we do is that there is a much greater chance that English will be used. My daughter is also in a Masters program in International Business in a German university which is taught in English. She went with some other teachers in her school to Turkey for a meeting about a multi-country project where though none of the participants (except her) were from English speaking countries the discussion and reports were all in English.
Mi no comprende. If you want a more complete answer than what’s below you need to be more precise in your question.
For me it started in 4th grade, although I’d spent three months in an immersion program in French in preschool (we moved to another town, saving me from six more months with that horrible teacher); the government had just made it compulsory to get a second language starting in 9th grade, and mine was a private school so they always make a point of going “above and beyond”, which in this case meant starting the compulsory second language in 4th. The bros (6 and 8 years younger) started it in 4th as well. My nephews have started learning some English vocabulary in kindergarten; for a while, my sister in law was considering sending them to a school that offers full immersion in English since preschool, but I got her to consider whether the subjects are taught correctly (I happen to know several of that school’s “immersion” teachers, and that they speak English like a drunk Swiss cow). The 5yo nephew knows some basic vocabulary and a few full sentences.
Most of my ESL teachers were traditionalists: “just memorize it”, “don’t expect it to make sense”. The ones who were native English speakers were notorious by their utter lack of knowledge of any grammar (explained in part in these boards, as some grammar tools which I grew up on are not used in the US - can’t expect the teacher to be able to perform a tree analysis when she’s American and nobody there even knows what a tree analysis is). The one I had in 9th and 10th grade was a godsend to those of us in the “I can’t learn what I don’t understand” camp, she made English make sense; she taught us comparative grammar (not only applying it, but how to come up with it), phonetics… of course, the students who were happy with “just memorize it” hated her, but hey, I’m happy
Some comments on Nava’s post. There is a French expression, “Il parle francais come une vache espagnol” (he speaks French like a Spanish cow).
When I was in school in the 1950s we certainly did learn to diagram sentences (I call those “tree diagrams” "coat hanger diagrams). I guess it has disappeared. When my daughter (who had been through French immersion here is Montreal as well as having spent a year, 4th grade, at the Ecole Francaise de Zurich) saw the word “noun”, she asked me whether that was what in French grammar was called a “nom”. It is, although that also means “name”.
In Finland, the system goes approximately like this:
A1 - first foreign language, starts in 3rd grade; everybody takes this. 91% of students in Finland apparently choose English as the A1 foreign language.
A2 - second foreign language, starts in 4th or 5th grade depending on the school; not obligatory.
B1 - “second official language”; starts in 7th grade. We have two official languages in Finland and both are required to be taught at the “peruskoulu” (1.-9. grade) level. This is the latest that you can start to study Finnish if you’re Swedish-speaking or Swedish if you’re Finnish-speaking. It’s also possible to start the second official language at the A1 or A2 level.
B2 - third foreign language, starts in 8th or 9th grade; not obligatory. Known as a C language if you continue it at the high school level.
D - fourth foreign language, starts in high school; not obligatory.
After 9th grade (age 16), you can choose to go to high school or vocational school or quit school altogether. In vocational schools, the language education is fairly limited; there are a certain amount of mandatory courses in the second official language and a foreign language, but nowhere near as much as in high school. In high school, you must study a certain course load of an A language and a B language and can also, in addition to that, take courses in a C language and/or a D language.
So, in theory, a student graduating from high school in Finland can have learned up to four foreign languages plus the official language which is not native to them. There are, of course, exceptions, like Steiner schools or “language bath” schools, which incorporate foreign languages into the teaching earlier or are taught mostly or completely in a foreign language.
I think the fact that over 90% of Finnish students start their English studies in 3rd grade combined with the fact that we also don’t really have dubbed TV shows or movies, except for those aimed at very small children, goes some way in explaining the fairly good English skills that most Finns have.
