I found myself taking part in a discussion on language learning this morning and thought it might be worth a while to drop in some things that are on my bloglater list. I will develop them in more depth later maybe but this is just an overview of them.
- on average, twice as many girls study languages at school leaving stage in both the Irish leaving certificate system and at A-level stage in England/Wales
- in absolute numbers, more students study higher level French in Ireland than study A-level French. A-level students have a higher average grade than HL Leaving certificate students and almost 30% get an A or higher at A-level, versus around 13% in Ireland.
- After French, the second most popular A-level foreign language is Spanish where the number of candidates is higher than for HL LC candidates.
- Spanish is the only language where there are more A-level candidates than HL LC candidates.
- The second most popular language for HL LC is German.
- HL LC statistics give figures for Italian; the A-Level stats didn’t, but interestingly, did give figures for Irish. If they were higher than Italian, then the figures for Italian are extremely low at A-Level stage.
- Amazon has opened up its Kindle store to include significantly more foreign language literature than was previously the case.
- The internet makes access to foreign language media significantly easier than was previously the case
- Facebook allows you to customise your newsfeed sources to include foreign language media options more easily than Google does. Google News, however customisable it is, is still a fiasco in that respect. It is distinctly monolingual – so while I can easily pull in foreign sources, those foreign sources are still English language.
With respect to the A-Level HL LC comparison, there are serious difficulties in doing a qualitative comparison given feature differences between the two exam systems, viz, in terms of mandatory subjects and de-facto mandatory subjects. The Leaving cert is a marginally less specialist set up and it is worth noting that the comparison figures above are specifically higher level figures and do not include the high number of students taking ordinary level studies. Students at LC level take 6 to 7 subjects whereas A-level tops out at 4 usually. Irish, English and mathematics are defacto mandatory in Ireland – nearly every single students takes all three – and most university requirements include a minimum of some sort of a pass in a foreign language module. Hence, the motivations are different. This may be reflected in the average grades which, for A-level, are across the board, higher.
Data sources:
- HL Leaving certificate: www.examinations.ie
- A-level: www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/14/a-level-results-2014-the-full-breakdown