Foreign Language Learning in Germany

In the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, the Minister for Education and Culture, Anette Schavan, is taking a significant step forward on the road to multi-lingual classrooms. She has proposed introducing foreign language instruction during the first school year, when pupils are only six years old.

Backing up her proposal, she cites studies by linguists showing that the earlier a child learns a foreign language, the more likely he or she will become fluent in that language. There is no limit to the number of languages a child is capable of learning, and certainly no minimum age requirement, the minister says.

Ambitious Project

Baden-Württemberg wants to establish foreign language courses for first graders, either for English or French, in all state primary schools by 2003. This will require the hiring of 1,600 new teachers and the re-training of thousands more.

The amount of money being pumped into the education system in Baden-Württenberg is enormous, but the project has wide-spread support among the citizens, especially among parents of school-age children.

Once all the structures are in place, pupils in Baden-Württemberg will be reading, writing, and speaking in their first foreign language by the time they are eight. The second and third foreign language will follow shortly thereafter between the third and sixth school year, respectively.

Language and Culture

Minister Schavan has said that in the future language courses will have to expand beyond pure grammar and vocabulary instruction to embrace a more all-encompassing approach to language and culture.

Foreign languages will be used to convey information in various different subjects such as social studies, science or even math. The idea is to turn the regular state schools into multi-lingual schools similar to the already-existing European schools.

Preserving Diversity

In presenting her state's proposal at the recent International Education Fair in Hanover, Minister Schavan claimed that Europe was in danger of losing its language diversity and that the situation was considerably better at the beginning of the last century. Her state's education model is designed to preserve language diversity by promoting the teaching of smaller European languages such as Dutch, Portuguese or Danish for the third foreign language. And not all schools in Baden-Württemberg will offer English as the first foreign language.

By teaching more languages at an earlier age, young Germans will have a better chance when competing for jobs within the European Union. Other federal states such as North-Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony will be watching developments in Baden-Württenberg closely. They are getting ready to introduce a foreign language in the first year of school as well.