WoLLoW: World of Languages, Languages of the World

By John Claughton

Let's start at the very beginning...

Of course,  the recent publication of the joint report by CIOL, ITI and ATC is right to emphasis the strategic imperative for universities to continue to support languages in the UK. We all know that this is a critical time, if not a time of crisis. However, if universities are to have any chance of turning the tide, we at WoLLoW would say that it is equally important, perhaps more important, to get it right in primary schools. As Maria sings in The Sound of Music, ‘Let’s start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.’

Getting it right means two things, making language study engaging and valuing the languages that pupils already know.

Last week there was an important debate in the House of Lords about languages, led by the egregious and indefatigable Baroness Coussins. However, in that debate there was too little talk of heritage languages. It is also a shame that the recent UK Government Curriculum and Assessment Review stuck with the French/Spanish primary model when there were so many voices, of teachers and academices calling for something better fitted to the pupils of today. It feels like an opportunity missed when the report itself leads off with the following principles:

‘Throughout the Review we are seeking to deliver a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented, whilst also exposing them to a wide range of perspectives that broaden their horizons. We make an overarching recommendation that the curriculum reforms should be guided by the principle that they reflect the diversity of our society and the contributions that have shaped it…The national curriculum is for all our children and young people, and they should feel both included in it and represented by it.’

A different approach

If there is to be progress, if there is to be a halt in the decline in languages and in the regard for languages, the answer may not lie in doing a bit better what we have always done, but in doing something different. If primary school pupils were taught not French and Spanish, but about languages, their own languages, as well as English and ‘modern foreign languages’ – and even Latin – the following things might happen:

• pupils might see that languages are relevant, interesting, valuable, even fun;
• pupils might learn more about themselves and each other, engendering mutual understanding and respect;
• pupils might feel that they belong in school, and feel that there is not so great a gap between their life at home and their life at school;
• parents might feel that what was going on at school had some regard for their history and their culture;
• pupils might be more inclined to study languages, whether their own family/heritage language, and this could be a massive asset for their futures, in human and economic terms;
• and, as these young people grow up, they might become the kind of adults who can build an integrated, cohesive, respectful and diverse society, and thus silence the voices of division in our political debate.
• And this approach would demolish the hierarchy of languages which has so beset us for so long.

Languages at the heart of society

Thus, it would place languages at the heart of our society. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? By strange chance, I have been working with some colleagues for several years to create a programme that does just that as I have written here before.

WoLLoW (World of Languages, Languages of the World), a brilliant palindromic acronym with an Egyptian faience hippopotamus as a logo, can:

• encourage boys and girls to talk about their own language, their own family, their own history;
• explore why and how English is the most mongrel of all languages, a dog’s breakfast of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman French, and polysyllabic Graeco-Latin inventions;
• prove that the pupils can learn the Greek alphabet more quickly than their teachers, and thereby discover why physics isn’t spelt 'fisiks' and dinosaurs have such preposterous names;
• ask why Tuesday is 'Tuesday' here and lots of different things everywhere else – and a WoLLoW lesson might even ask why there are seven days in a week;
• in a WoLLoW lesson pupils can learn braille and/or sign-language, or even create their own language.

This looks quite good fun, and it turns out that it is.

In conclusion

The last of my words must go to a pupil at my old school, a young person with Malaysian heritage, who, whilst in Year 11, taught WoLLoW in a local, Birmingham primary school:

"Working on these lessons, from the very first session, has not only given the children we have taught the opportunity to have their languages and cultures represented in class discussions, but has also allowed me to reconnect with my language and feel more confident in reclaiming it as a part of who I am. I am someone who, like, I suspect, a lot of the children we have taught, has felt disconnected from his language for a long time, and has been given the chance to once again put it front and centre and find their sense of self within it again."

Maybe we should stop wallowing in the past and focus on a more inclusive future for languages. WoLLoW points the way.

John Claughton is a co-founder of ‘WoLLoW’. He taught Classics for 17 years at Eton College and was Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham from 2006-2016. In 2016, he won the TES Independent School Lifetime Achievement Award.

You can find out more from WoLLoW’s website: https://theworldoflanguages.co.uk/

WoLLoW is a charity. Teaching resources are free and can be secured by emailing Abbie Dean at Norwich School: [email protected].

Views expressed on CIOL Voices are those of the writer and may not represent those of the wider membership or CIOL.