David Cameron urges British students to ditch French and learn Mandarin

David Cameron plays table tennis – pīngpāng qiú or 乒乓球, for you language college students – during his pay a visit to to a primary school in Chengdu. Photograph: AP

David Cameron, who has notoriously poor schoolboy French, is urging today’s youngsters to abandon the language of Molière and Voltaire to concentrate on the tongue of the future – Mandarin.

In a parting shot, as he left China after a 3-day check out, the prime minister explained that pupils need to appear beyond the classic French and German lessons and alternatively emphasis on China.

To reinforce his message the prime minister quoted Nelson Mandela, who said finding out a person else’s language is the very best way to their heart. Cameron stated: “I want Britain linked up to the world’s quick-expanding economies. And that consists of our young people studying the languages to seal tomorrow’s enterprise deals.

“By the time the kids born nowadays depart school, China is set to be the world’s largest economic system. So it truly is time to appear beyond the standard target on French and German and get numerous far more kids studying Mandarin.

“As Mandela once explained: ‘If you speak to a guy in a language he understands that goes to his head, if you talk to him in his own language that goes to his heart.’”

Cameron, who visited a college for six- and seven-yr-olds studying English in Chengdu, mentioned that a partnership amongst the British Council and Hanban – the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language – will double the number of Chinese language assistants in the United kingdom by 2016 and offer improved funding to reduce the cost to colleges of offering Mandarin as a language selection.

In an expansion of the United kingdom-China School Partnerships programme, funding will also be offered for 60 headteachers to make research visits to China in 2014.

The announcement was welcomed by the British Council and the British Academy, the two of which have been pushing for policies to reverse the decline in college students taking contemporary languages at school and university level.

Martin Davidson, the British Council’s chief executive who has been going to China with Cameron, explained: “The promotion of Chinese language in the Uk and the English language in China are both crucial to economic and cultural relations between the two countries. This initiative will boost collaboration and is specifically considerable offered that recent British Council study exhibits that Mandarin is a single of ten languages not broadly spoken in the Uk and nevertheless crucial to our long term development and prosperity.”

In recent research the British Council placed Mandarin in the best 5 most essential languages for Britain’s potential prosperity, protection and influence. But it located only 1% of the grownup population speaks Mandarin to a degree that makes it possible for them to conduct a basic conversation. Just 3,000 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland entered for Chinese languages GCSEs in 2013, placing it far behind the traditional selections of French with 177,000, Spanish with 91,000 and German with 62,000 entrants, as effectively as Urdu, Polish and Arabic.

But the popularity of Chinese languages improves at A-degree, where it was the fourth most common present day language in 2013, with three,300 entrants compared with 11,000 taking A-degree French and four,200 taking German.

The estimated 500,000 ethnic Chinese residing in Britain make it the largest overseas Chinese population of any European country.

Professor Dame Helen Wallace, the British Academy’s foreign secretary, stated her organisation had been arguing for an improvement in foreign language skills, and had identified Mandarin as 1 of the extended assortment of languages to be promoted in schools.

But a lack of certified teachers could be a barrier to strengthening its acceptance, Wallace explained.

“The provide chain wants to work in each methods. Youngsters require to be persuaded to do it and you need to have the availability of capable teachers at all levels – main, secondary and university – to develop optimistic reinforcement in the availability of teachers and the curiosity of teachers.”

And she warned: “No such approach works unless you stick at it. There’s no use doing this for two or 3 years and then forgetting about it – you have to make a extended-term investment in this type of alter capability.”Laura Chan, one of the co-founders of the Marco Polo Academy, a bilingual Mandarin-English primary school opening in Barnet next September as portion of the free of charge schools programme, explained the prime minister’s announcement was very good information for the standing of Mandarin.

“It’s a wonderful aid. It will enhance people’s awareness of Mandarin as a language they can understand,” she mentioned.

“One particular purpose we desired to set up the free of charge school is that the educating of language in the Uk is not especially effective, specially for young children.”

From September 2014, studying foreign languages will be compulsory in main colleges under the new nationwide curriculum.

David Cameron urges British students to ditch French and learn Mandarin