Member-only story
France Trapped in the Past
FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN FRANCE
THE EU TRAP -> NOTIONAL-FUNCTIONAL
DENIS GIRARD AS THE RINGMASTER
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
The results of the teaching of foreign languages in Europe are catastrophic, or at least very disquieting for a policy that has been going on for more than fifty years. It is obvious in the following charts available at
In the first chart, I will not consider all countries but only France. In the 25–64-year-old population from 2007 to 2016 the percentage of people having no foreign language shifted from 41.2% to 39.9%, 4 percentile points higher than the EU average. In the same population the proportion of people having one foreign language (all proficiency levels together and with no specification if the first language of immigrants is taken into account) shifted from 35.9% to 35.4% which is close to the EU average. The proportion of the same population having two foreign languages (all proficiency levels together and with no specification if the first language of immigrants is taken into account) shifted from 18.4% to 20.1% one percentile point under the EU average in 2011 and 2016. Finally, those having three foreign languages shifted from 4.5% to 4.6% and these figures were three percentile points under the EU average, in spite of the great number of immigrants whose languages could be considered as foreign languages in France. It may reveal most students, and a vast proportion of migrants just drop their original languages, at least as for the school system, though I think they are not properly counted since it may reveal ethnicity which is banned from French statistics, and some of them might even pretend they do not speak their original languages at all to look less foreign.
In the second chart that gives a global vision of France’s position in Europe, France is twenty-second out of twenty-eight countries 4 or 5 points under the EU average. Now we have looked at…
