Home-Tutoring Guidance

Following our first tip yesterday, we will be holding a free open Zoom meeting tomorrow to answer any questions parents or students may have. Anyone can join using the following link: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/155105818 and Meeting ID: 155 105 818 .

Home -Tutoring Language Tips

Day 1 - Getting Started with vocabulary

If you son or daughter is learning a language, you may be struggling with how to provide help.

As we know, vocabulary learning can be a bit of a chore, but it’s essential, as it’s the route to success.   Make vocabulary learning more fun and try out some of these ideas:

• Get some coloured card to make vocabulary flashcards.

• Stick these up around the house (you’ll be sub-consciously learning then all the time).

• Always learn vocabulary in context (e.g. learn all food & drink together).

• Draw out colourful mind maps – fill a large sheet of paper with vocabulary (one colour for the English, another colour for the French/German, etc. word). Use one sheet of paper per theme.

• Use ‘Freemind’ to create your mind maps, if you prefer working on your iPad.

• For more advanced learners, who love grammar, you can colour code for opinions, nouns, adjectives, connectives, etc.

• The app Duolingo is fun to use.

• Try to revise vocab for 15 minutes a day and you’ll be amazed by the results!

Help with Home Tutoring

We’re conscious that there will be many parents at home today, who will be trying their best to provide some home schooling for their children.  To help with this, over the next few days we shall be providing some free guidance, tips and where possible, complimentary materials for tutoring English, German and French at primary and secondary level.  Watch this space for updates.

Brexit Makes Business German Critical

The case for elevating language learning in the workplace

English is no longer the business language of Europe. Expatriate workers are reporting a sea of change in its use and international language schools operating within mainland Europe are seeing an 80% increase in the demand for Business German.

But Britain has been significantly behind the language curve for some time and losing out because of it. Before Brexit came along, poor modern language skills were already costing the British economy £74bn per annum in lost opportunities. That is £2,700 per annum for every working person in the UK.

Whatever happens to Brexit, if Britain wants to trade with Europe it must rapidly and markedly improve its language skills: particularly in Business German.

Sadly, employers cannot turn to the education system for help. Modern languages are no longer seen as a priority in the school curriculum. Since 2002, there has been a 40% decline in the number of students taking A level German and only 5% of students leave school with a GCSE in more than one foreign language.

So how can British employers turn this situation around? How, somewhat against the odds, can they obtain the necessary language skills to compete in a post-Brexit Europe?

This Yorschool paper addresses that question. We’ve collated a number of Yorschool case studies as well as compelling statistics in order to investigate why English is no longer the business language of Europe. We also consider what can be done to ensure British businesses improve their position in the language landscape, especially with the onset of Brexit.

Packed full of practical advice for Business Leaders, download your copy now and continue the conversation online.

Why Yorschool? An interview with founder Rita Bose

In this Q+A, Rita Bose shares with us how she was inspired to start Yorschool, why learning a foreign language is so vital for business in 2020, and the kind of sessions Yorschool offers. With Yorschool now into its second year, we’ll also hear from a few of Yorschool’s first clients on their experiences.

If you’re still unsure where to start in your language learning journey, read on to see how easy it can be to make progress.

Grab a coffee and settle in!

1. What were you doing before Yorschool?

I was Head of Modern Foreign Languages for 16 years in a secondary school in rural North Yorkshire, where I taught German and French.  German is my real passion and it was always so fulfilling, encouraging my young Yorkshire learners to just have fun with the guttural sounds of this great language.  I used to motivate them to be as creative as possible in their GCSE exams, which meant that their examiners would enter their world of alien creatures, pet tigers and so on!  I also spent eight very happy years teaching in the British Forces’ Schools in Germany, where I began to liaise with the local German primary and secondary schools, culminating in joint residential school trips.  Living and working in Germany gave me the unique opportunity to really get to know and love the country, wonderfully friendly people and the heart-warming and at times, funny traditions. 

2. When did the idea for Yorschool come to you?

Actually, ever since the more heated Brexit debates started last year; I’d been having discussions with various overseas students and friends.  At the beginning of 2018, following my CELTA qualification in 2017, I began to teach a range of really interesting and inspiring international students, and business people, many of whom were also German. Teaching my mother tongue, as opposed to teaching a language which I’d formally learnt, definitely made me more aware of how difficult the English language is; but it also made me wonder why speakers of other languages were so good at it.  The answer is simple: in all European countries and so many further afield countries, it is the norm to learn another language. Yes, that’s it: it’s the norm, it’s expected, it’s compulsory and it’s one of life’s essentials! However, my learners then naïvely asked me two very simple questions: “Why don’t you British learn languages? How will you survive when you leave Europe?”

What simple, but crucial questions!  This then led me to seriously thinking and talking about setting up my own language school, which would aim to ‘get Brits talking German’, as well as continue to foster good relationships with those people making such an admirable effort to learn our complex language.  The latter also provides me with an opportunity to learn so much about other cultures too! Yorschool has only been going since December 2018, but it’s already a source of pride and real enjoyment. I really do look forward to seeing what each new day brings!

“It’s so important to engage in small talk, and really build that trust and a meaningful partnership between our companies.”

— Simon Pollard, Head of Manufacturing & Logistics, Portakabin (UK & Europe)

3. Why do you think languages are so integral for business in this day and age?

One businessman whom I currently teach German to expressed his frustration at having to rely on his German counterparts to speak to him in English.  Our European trade partners are slowly growing weary of holding every meeting in English (even if just one English person is present). “We are on the backfoot before we even begin to talk deals!”  He also wanted to know what the others were saying amongst themselves, before and after the meeting. “It’s so important to engage in small talk, and really build that trust and a meaningful partnership between our companies.” 

At the end of last year I was working in Frankfurt and listening to Angela Merkel discussing Brexit in Parliament.  She said that the UK was Germany’s fifth closest trading partner, but as a result of all the Brexit chaos, the UK has already dropped to seventh position and she fears that this drop will increase further.  She talked about the loss of trust between our countries which the UK would have to work very hard at to regain.  Surely we need to start with showing sufficient respect to learn their language? Nelson Mandela puts this in ‘an eloquent nutshell’: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

“Rita’s German lessons are both hard work and fun.  She achieves this by challenging the individual learner as part of a group, maximising the time spent speaking and listening.”

— Martin, an adult evening class student for German

4. What would you say to someone that’s totally daunted by the prospect of going back to learning languages?

Having taught adult evening language classes for several years now, I totally understand this stance.  This is one reason why Yorschool is unique, as our lessons are both light-hearted, but practical and engaging.  The learners themselves often determine the content and they all have slightly different reasons for wanting to learn German.  Their previous language learning experience is also varied and therefore at Yorschool, we use this wealth of experience, which adults bring to a class and before they realise, they are soon discussing relevant issues in German, which genuinely capture their interest.  This last year we’ve ranged from working out the German lyrics for Beatles songs, to talking through our holiday pictures in German and practising dialogues for car breakdowns on the Autobahn. 

“Rita’s German lessons are both hard work and fun.  She achieves this by challenging the individual learner as part of a group, maximising the time spent speaking and listening.  My enjoyment of her teaching has ensured that I will seek further opportunities to read and speak the language,” Martin.

“I thoroughly enjoyed learning German with Rita.  We all looked forward to the weekly classes as every one was enjoyable and varied, with a balance of communication skills and grammar points.  Rita was always very encouraging and we all felt that we made good progress.” Vivienne, a Yorschool student.

“[Rita] made us so more confident in terms of using the English language at work, school and leisure,” Catarina Gagula, English as a foreign language student.

5. What kind of lessons do you offer?

This is something which is constantly changing, due to client requests!  Our ever-increasingly more popular Business German has extended to small groups, with specific requests to prepare for business meetings.  However, the most exciting recent development has been to accompany clients on business trips to Germany and to facilitate discussions in meetings.  This has even extended to ‘walking a client around the city’, providing support (if required) with car hire or public transport, hotel check-in and using public transport.  I also do the reverse here in beautiful York, where I teach German students on Easter and Summer camps. We’ve branched out to teaching a whole family now online, which is such a fun and rewarding experience, as they all motivate each other and help out, so nobody feels worried about forgetting a word or phrase! 

In a similar vein, we now teach small groups of international business people who live and work in Germany and they need specific language for their jobs.  I must just mention one very talented and professional Romanian business person who is based in London. We work through her blog each fortnight, which gives her the incentive to write a regular blog and after our session, it’s ready to go live!  So as you can see, the Yorschool Way really is ‘your way’, as it’s totally bespoke and learner-led!

 “I just want to say thanks for those past months. It has been so nice and fun to learn a new language. You have been an amazing teacher! I have really enjoyed it!” Emil Telsgård, a Swedish Business German online client.

6. Can HR departments contact you?

Absolutely!  A good number of companies are now offering foreign language lessons as part of their ‘Employee Benefit’ package, which is very well received by their employees, as they are not only learning a new skill (at their company’s expense!), but they feel genuinely valued by their company and therefore are more likely to remain.

“Yorschool accommodates a range of learners, from different time zones, and therefore we recognise that flexibility is key to our success. Some clients are enjoying a hearty breakfast, or evening hot chocolate during our lessons! ”

— Rita Bose

7. For people who feel like they couldn’t possibly fit in language lessons on top of everything else, what can Yorschool do?

This is topical, as I’ve recently started having conversation sessions in German myself! I wanted online sessions, but to suit my busy schedule, and therefore by doing this online, I can choose when and where I’ll be for my weekly German catch-up with a real live German person! I look forward to our conversations, as they enable me to keep abreast of current German thinking, the latest trends and news updates. Yorschool accommodates a range of learners, from different time zones, and therefore we recognise that flexibility is key to our success. Some clients are enjoying a hearty breakfast, or evening hot chocolate during our lessons! For our face to face lessons, we travel to our students or clients, to their place of work, or we meet in a nearby coffee shop, to give them a welcome break from their screen!

8. What one piece of advice would you give someone about learning languages?

The piece of advice which I always give myself: I won’t become fluent overnight, but learning to speak another language liberates me.  I’m a real foodie person and when I’m in Italy, for example, I need to know what I’m ordering! Learn a little every day, keep a vocab book handy, make notes, and just give yourself small, weekly goals.  Never beat yourself up and lose faith, just keep going and very gradually it really will start to fall into place and as soon as that happens, that sense of personal achievement is the best feeling in the world!!  Oops, I think that’s more than one piece of advice! Here we go: Stop saying that you wish you could speak another language; just book your first lesson instead!

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Let’s talk about: The state of language teaching in the UK

Perhaps you have a child unsure about their GCSE options this autumn, or you or someone in your family have mock exams in the coming year and need some motivation - rest assured, a brief glimpse on the headlines over language learning will provide this. 

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 (yes it was already that long ago!) there have been plenty of column inches spent on debating language learning, English as a foreign language, and how we should be prioritising teaching our children in a rapidly changing geo-political climate. One thing’s certain, Britain’s place within the EU is changing, and the best thing we can do is to remain part of the conversation, literally and figuratively.

In this blog, I’ll be gathering a few press clippings that have caught my eye in recent months, and sharing some of my own experience from my students, and key learnings from my former days as a language teacher in schools. 

Leave a comment below if you’ve also got a story to share, or a viewpoint to air! I’d love to hear from you.

In April, as students broke up for the Easter holidays, typically a time for a lot of revision for GCSE students, this article from the Guardian got me thinking about how the government prioritises language learning in UK schools, and a fact many parents might be shocked about - that for many years now, UK schools have been turning to foreign governments to fund languages.

The article details how around 16,500 British primary school children pupils benefit from a scheme whereby Italian teachers have been paid by the Italian government to work in UK schools to promote the language. UK schools are increasingly turning to foreign governments to fund languages. The Portuguese embassy also pays for full-time Portuguese language teachers, albeit on a smaller scale, as do the Spanish embassy, who offer free material, resources, teacher training and advice for UK primary schools. 

“Since 2014 it has been compulsory for all schools to teach a modern or ancient foreign language to children aged 7- 11. Yet progress has been patchy, at best. Last year’s Language Trends report by the British Council found that “languages remain a marginal subject which many primary schools find challenging to deliver alongside many other competing demands”. 

Back in the 1990s, when I taught in British Forces in Germany I was seconded for two years to deliver German to our six primary schools and to provide the poor, over-worked primary teachers with training, so that they could teach their pupils German too.  I know from this experience that primary school children just soak up language at that age and they had no inhibitions to speak it. I’m 100 per cent convinced that it’s the best time to learn a language, and this is why our counterparts in Germany, Sweden and Finland and Italy, for example, are so confident and competent in speaking English.

If we teach our children from a young age that learning a foreign language is an essential component of their education, (as it is a life skill, after all), then we could be up there with our friends over the Channel.  Back in the UK I’ve had made several attempts to work alongside our primary colleagues to replicate the model I started in Germany, but SATs, league tables and a very tight curriculum have unfortunately hampered our efforts.

Relying on other countries to fund language learning in the UK is a trend that’s likely to continue, with the Goethe-Institute in London contacting 21,000 primary schools to help introduce German.

“We work with 200 primary schools: we give them free teaching and learning materials, which are designed for anyone, even if you don’t speak German,” says Karl Pfeiffer, director of educational links at the Goethe-Institute.

While the government has set a target of 90 per cent of pupils in English schools taking a language GCSE by 2025, progress on actually achieving this has been slow. 

“The number of pupils sitting an A-level in a Modern Foreign Language have slumped, and in March the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages published a report with proposals on how to turn things around, including measures to improve language provision in primary schools. The report calls for compulsory language teaching from the age of five, a wider range of languages taught and for all schools to have a language assistant.”

 This is a typical stunt by the government to ‘talk the talk’ about foreign language provision in the UK, as there are no concrete plans to fund this. The current workload of primary teachers is not fully acknowledged and there remain two crucial flaws with the making languages compulsory in our primary schools:  who is going to have the knowledge and expertise to teach these? Are we finally going to make foreign languages compulsory at GCSE Level? What’s the point in languages becoming compulsory at primary level, just to dropped again at the age of 14?

This brings me to another press clipping that’s been on my mind, “Brexit Britain cannot afford to be laissez-faire about its languages crisis”, written by British Academy president David Cannadine.

Here Cannadine questions why, as a small island off the coast of mainland Europe, we remain famously bad at speaking other languages. A-level entries for languages are down by a third in 10 years, while recent analysis from the British Academy shows that between 2007-2008 and 2017-2018, the number of students studying languages at university has fallen by another half. 

Yet more than half (58 per cent) of UK adults wish they hadn’t let the language skills they learned at school slip, 77 per cent agree that language skills increase employability and just over half (53 per cent) regret not having made the most of studying languages when they had the chance. Clearly we are a nation that values language learning, even if we have not always rushed to do it. 

Whenever I teach adults to speak German or French, the first thing they say is that the regret not taking this subject seriously enough at school, or not taking it to exam level, as they now realise how their career opportunities could differ if they had a language to offer.  Now that these adults are actually paying for tuition in their own time, face to face or online, their progress is always so dramatic; they now see the value in learning a foreign language.

Another part of this article really struck a chord with me: “At some point in our history, we seem to have accepted the idea that we do not need to learn languages and that we are not very good at them anyway. This is curious, given that we are an island nation that needs to trade to survive.”

It is quite clear that Brexit is changing the business landscape in Europe.  Over 80 per cent of Yorschool’s clients are now businessmen either working in, or selling to Germany. They come from all corners of the Globe and have to come to use because they expect that post-Brexit, German, not English, will be the business language of Europe.

All of my current non English clients are fluent in English and yet they are still committing their time effort into learning how to speak German. What is also just as important here, is that their place of employment is funding the lessons and they take place during the working day.  So do we want to be on the short list for a top job which could involve travel and business talk, or do we want to out of the running?

“Languages can no longer be regarded as an optional extra. Britain must meet this challenge head-on and prove to the world that it is, after all, an outward-looking, global nation.”

Which brings me to a final, and perhaps most inspiring press clipping from this brief overview, “Learn another European language”.

While we await a decision on Brexit, it’s helpful to focus on the benefits language learning brings, that will never change, no matter the result in October (or sooner):

“Speaking foreign languages is about meeting people halfway, building bridges and accepting differences – all skills sorely in need of some practice, judging by the current tone of public conversation [...] above all, languages open so many doors to understanding. There are few better ways of grasping why so many British negotiating gambits flop in Brussels than reading a German newspaper’s take on them.”

Whichever side you fall on for the Brexit debate, it’s hard to ignore this sentiment:

“It’s true that English remains the lingua franca of big tourist resorts and business conferences. But the trouble with grandly relying on everyone else to speak your language is that it can make you oddly vulnerable. What stubborn monoglots often don’t realise is that they will only ever hear as much as the people around them want them to hear; that private conversations and whispered asides will remain a closed book. If you really want to take back control, then learn a language, and with it the small covert thrill of eavesdropping on conversations that people don’t realise you can understand.”

“But it’s Brexit that could turn an abstract intellectual pleasure into a small private act of defiance, both for grieving Remainers and for those liberal leavers who actually meant what they said about leaving the EU but not leaving Europe. For those who can’t bear to see Britain defined by belligerent isolationism, who don’t want the rest of the world to think that this is who we are, then one tiny but practical way of showing it is brushing up on a European language and making a determined effort to use it. Cold comfort, obviously, for those who would rather Britain never left at all. But if the great rupture is coming, then we still have a choice over how culturally isolated we become. The least we can do is keep talking.”

For those students in Year 8 or 9 who are currently still considering taking a language at GCSE, this is the time to make the right decision for your future.  From my experience as Head of MFL in a secondary school for 16 years, some find it difficult to justify taking a language when there are so many other Options, and especially when headlines are constantly telling us that GCSE Modern Foreign Language grades are lower than other subjects. 

Learning a language is undoubtedly hard work, but I know from all of my feedback and years of teaching that it is such great fun at the same time, as it opens up a whole new world: the experience is enriched by learning about the country, culture, traditions, food and history, not to mention the fact that they we learn so much about our own language at the same time!  Have you thought about taking the GCSE or A Level language option, but outside school? One to one or very small group lessons outside the conventional classroom are so much more enjoyable, rewarding and successful.