How the manufactured narrative of ‘failure’ is distracting us from resolving the systemic problems holding back the study of Modern Languages – Part One.
This post was kindly written by Vincent Everett, who is head of languages in a comprehensive school and sixth form in Norfolk. He blogs as The Nice Man Who Teaches Languages.
We have to bring an end to the Culture Wars in Modern Foreign Languages in England. Since 2019 we have been convulsed in an internecine political fight over whether our subject is about Communication or Intellectual Conceptualisation. Of course, it’s both. The same goes for Literature, Linguistics, Content Integrated Language Learning (CLIL), and Culture. Likewise, we can encompass transactional travel language, personal expression, professional proficiency, creative or academic language. Teachers have all of these on their radar, and make decisions on how to select and integrate them on a daily basis.
Our subject benefits from the richness of all these ingredients, and to privilege one or to exclude others, is to make us all the poorer. Teachers work in the rich and messy overlap between Grammar and Communication, engaging with pupils at every stage through their encounters with and progression through another language.
Meanwhile, we have allowed the culture wars to distract us from the very real problems facing our subject. The first is unfair grading at GCSE. The allocation of grades in languages is harsher than in their other subjects. Above a grade 3, this widens to a whole grade’s difference compared to a subject like History.
The narrative that it is harder to succeed in languages is accurate. Not because of the difficulty of the course content or the exams, but because of the determination of the allocation of grades. It’s not accurate to say that this is a reflection of pupils’ progress or the quality of teaching compared to other subjects. That calibration has not been made. In fact, grades are not calibrated one subject to another. The only calibration that is made, is to perpetuate grading within the subject year on year.
This was most famously set up in advance when we moved to a new GCSE in 2018. The unfair grading of the old GCSE was carefully and deliberately transferred across to the new GCSE. So pupils taking the new course and the new exam, even though it was proposed to be a better course and a better exam, had no chance of showing they could get better grades. Furthermore, where under the old A-G grading system, the difference between languages and other subjects had been around half a grade, the new 9-1 grading meant that the difference in the key area of grades 4 and above, was now stretched to a whole grade, because of the way the old grades were mapped onto the new ones.
The lower grades given out in languages are a strong disincentive for take-up at GCSE. There is the accurate narrative that pupils will score a lower grade if they pick languages, which acts as a deterrent not only for pupils, but also for schools. One way to score higher in league tables is to have fewer pupils taking MFL. There is also the inaccurate narrative that this is a reflection of the pupils’ own ability, the nation’s ability, or the quality of teaching. The allocation of grades is a historical anomaly perpetuated year-on-year, not a reflection of actual achievement.
This is the biggest issue facing modern languages. It would also be the easiest to fix. Grade boundaries in other subjects are used in order to bring standards into line. If an exam is too easy or too hard, and many pupils score a high mark or a low mark, the grade boundaries are used to make sure the correct number of pupils get the grade. Except, that is, in modern languages, where the thresholds are used to make sure that grades are out of line with other subjects. Imagine if languages grades were allocated in line with other subjects, would there be a clamour of voices insisting they should be made more difficult?
There is a very real danger of misinterpreting this manufactured narrative of “failure” in languages. It features in every report or proposal, but often instead of identifying it as an artificial anomaly, it is used to diagnose a deficit and prescribe a solution. Often this is a solution taken from the culture wars, ignoring the fact that schools and teachers are already expertly blending and balancing the elements of our subject.
Unfair grading at GCSE is the greatest of our problems, and the easiest to sort out. In Part 2, I shall look at the trickier question of what happens post-16.
Comments
Anna Perry says:
Interesting – I had no idea about the grading issues that make GCSEs in MFL less attractive and competitive than GCSEs in other subjects.
Nonetheless, my most deeply held belief about MFL teaching is that it far too often glosses over the embodied nature of language acquisition. Speaking is a motor skill acquired from other, more proficient speakers and reading aloud with a proficient native speaker is a crucial driver of fluency. Over-intellectualising what MFL acquisition is about diverts attention away from the foundational skills that underpin advanced skills.
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Vincent Everett says:
Thank you for your comment and thank you for reading. The links in the post will show you the detail of how severe the unfair grading is, and how far back it goes. It is shocking and deeply damaging. I understand your point about the balance between acquisition and intellectual study. This balance is lived in classrooms in schools every day, with teachers monitoring and steering a course through the middle ground. There is huge richness to our subject which we should recognise and harness in all its messy reality.
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Vincent Everett says:
And interestingly, the “there’s not enough lesson time for acquisition” argument is used… by the people advocating intellectual conceptualisation of grammar.
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Anna Perry says:
While French, Spanish and German are clearly outliers on the scale of GCSE grading severity, why should we not conclude from the data you link to that English and Maths are not too graded too leniently?
MFL, like Art and Music, have a tangible production component not shared by all academic subjects. While I concur with the view that GCSEs in all subjects need to offer candidates equal chances of success, is the problem with MFL GCSEs not that the standard of language production achieved is very low in layman’s terms?
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Vincent Everett says:
I think I managed to put my reply as a new comment by mistake. I tried to find an example of KS4 work I have permission to share.
But can you see how pervasive and pernicious the narrative is? The links in the post show that unfair grading has not been calibrated on this way. It is a historical anomaly that has been fossilised. But still people find it hard to get away from the narrative that we are somehow bad at languages. The French think they are bad at languages. The Spanish think they are bad at languages.
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Anna Perry says:
I understand and greatly sympathise with the calibration issue. However, as someone who lives in France (and had my children schooled in the French system) but has lived in other European countries, I do think that both the British and the French are bad at languages, mostly because they are not made a priority in the education system in the way they are in some other countries. It’s incredibly frustrating for those of us who feel that our lives have been immeasurably enriched by learning other languages, who believe Europe would be stronger politically and economically if we had greater cross cultural understanding and would like to contribute to helping young people build that dream.
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Vincent Everett says:
I don’t have any GCSE speaking exams I can share with you. Here’s a link to a post with an example of Y10 writing. This pupil went on to get a good (but not top) grade. They did tell a version of this story in their exam, but improvised rather than memorised. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2024/05/text-book-course-book-part-three.html – scroll down to the handwritten example.
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Vincent Everett says:
Trying to find more examples so people can judge GCSE standards for themselves rather than swallow the narrative. Here’s work from the same pupil retelling the same story in different language 6 months later. Copy and paste the link. https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-new-gcse-was-meant-to-stop-rote.html
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Anna Perry says:
I have every sympathy with the argument that GCSE MFL grades are unfair: that there is a lower probability of an individual student getting as high a grade in an MFL as in other subjects is an inadmissible system failure. However, in the real world beyond the English KS4 examination régime, MFL are measured by the CEFR and, on its measures, GCSEs and A-levels (let alone university degrees) are not fit for purpose. Families in England who wish their children to study MFL to any degree of competence either need to do that outside the school system entirely or else need to use the school system as one provider among others with a goal tied to CEFR benchmarks. Families who, for whatever reason, do not have the resources to enrich their children’s MFL learning beyond that which is offered by the education system have to make do with resources that are insufficient even for the system’s own examination benchmarks (GCSE, A-levels), let alone the more objective and universal CEFR.
The situation is not very different in France, by the way, though families’ understanding of the inadequate resources per student in LV1 English is probably greater that English families’ understanding of the inadequate resources per student in MFL French.
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Vincent Everett says:
I think it is a very good point that often people are comparing the learning of English pupils in school, with learning in other countries where there is a whole ecosystem of learning outside of school and continuing beyond age 16. I will talk about this in Part Two…
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Vincent Everett says:
Ofqual have done a study looking at GCSE compared to the European Framework. You can look up the results for yourself. Although it’s an exam based on testing knowledge rather than comprehension so the question style doesn’t really fit. Did you look at the examples of the sort of work pupils can produce at GCSE?
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Anna Perry says:
I did look, yes. It’s unfair to pass judgement when I don’t know what input those students have had (how many years of MFL, how many hours per week, how many students per class, the calibre of the peer group, how the work was scaffolded…). 15 year olds studying English in France might be making 10 minute film for which they wrote the story, directed, acted, edited.
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