People on every continent speak English be it for business, as their national language or as a second language after their native tongue. Yet many countries close to home are falling behind those further afield in terms of the standard of English that students are taught. And now the President of France Nicholas Sarkozy has led an assault on the old fashioned and ineffective teaching methods in France. Now schools and private language institutions are starting teaching English as a foreign language in different ways.
Now school leavers are taking their learning of English to the next step by paying for lessons in private colleges. Even though students in France are given English lessons for 6 years of their school life, they are taught in a written and not oral method which makes it harder for them to speak English confidently. So they are hiring private tutors at expensive costs to teach them English which they can use in conversation.
Now the President wants this method to be used in state schools instead of the traditional way. France really needs to improve its standing in the Test of English as a Foreign language because it stands only 69th out of 109 countries even though it spends 5.9% of its GDP on education. This is a poor performance for one of the world’s most established democracies and Britain’s closest neighbour after Ireland.
It is no surprise that it is the French education system itself which is resisting learning better English. For nearly 400 years the Academie Francaise has been purging the French language of foreign words. And in terms of French culture, English imported words have been kept out of film and music for 25 years.
This has made many students wary of speaking English before they have perfected the language on paper, for fear of adding to the demise of the French language. but there are more and more people who want to pay for a better knowledge of English. It will help them immeasurably if they want to get into business, as many firms only use English to correspond.
With new attention being placed on the way languages are taught in France there has never been a better time to start teaching English as a foreign language there. Ideal if you want to teach in a foreign country without living too far away from home.
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