Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really ‘bad language learners’?

Abstract

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the constructive feedback received from two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 The PET is an intermediate level examination and aligned to B1 on the CEF. The Part 2 Mark Scheme is used to assess adequacy of content as well as degree of successful communication; the Part 3 Mark Scheme is used to assess use of language, range of structure and vocabulary, organisation and accuracy.

2 http://www.nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/155436?uc=force_uj (accessed 25 August, 2009).

3 The German curricula have been revised since this study was conducted and writing appears to have been deprioritised to some extent. New curricula, for instance in NRW, stress the importance of speaking skills and will replace one written end-of-year examination in 2014/2015 in both lower school and at A Level equivalent with a speaking exam (Ministry of Education 2013), which suggests that writing might be somewhat deprioritised.