This a bit of a play on acronyms. TOEFL stands for Test of English as a Foreign Language. My version is TOFL which stands for Teaching of Foreign Languages. In my humble opinion TOFL in the UK is absolutely abysmal.
In my own experience, and this dates from the sixties, the teaching was pretty useless. I did ‘O’ level Latin, French and German. I passed all three but could not speak a word in any of them, at least not intelligible to a native frog or Eric. Even my Latin pronunciation was later mocked by various foreign Catholics. I suppose the church has kept it going until relatively recently.
The objective of the ‘O’ level was to beat the grammar into your skull. There was an oral test for the exam but it only contributed 5% of the marks. To my mind these days surely the objective of learning a foreign language is to communicate and you can’t do that if they can’t understand you.
To be able to use a foreign language you have to be able to think in it. It is no good thinking in English, translating it in your head and then blurting it out because by then the listener(s) will have lost interest.
After 5 years of French I was approaching the stage where I could start to think in it, with only 3 years of German under my belt I never got that far. As for Latin there were far too many obscure words to remember so though I passed, it was not with a great grade.
In academic terms I was a lazy so and so. I loved History and actually made an effort at that. I made no effort at languages but I found them quite easy.
To this day I still remember my surprise, having spoken only English for 11 years, when I discovered that there were things like subject and object, even in English. Latin was a shock with its nominatives, vocatives, acusatives, datives and even ablatives. I also remember watching Highway Patrol in the 1950s and asking my dad if Brod Crawford, one of Hollywood’s legendary drinkers, was speaking English. I would have been about 7 at the time and had never heard an American accent.
In my defence these days I can say I was pretty fluent in German, struggled with French and even learnt a bit of Dutch in Brussels via Berlitz. I improved my German by spending a lot of time working in Germany and Switzerland. I have to say I can curse in seven languages though sometimes I may be guilty of something like “bluddy bluddy” in someone else’s native tongue.
When we returned to England from Spain my children were fluent in Spanish. The girl was 15 and the boy was 12. My daughter obviously took Spanish GCSE within the year and got A*. I went to see the teacher about putting my son in for the GCSE at 12 years old. He condescendingly told me we don’t put them in until they are 16. I said if he waits that long he will have forgotten it and if you don’t put him in I will pay for it somewhere else. He grudgingly agreed and my boy got an A. Both of these grades would be attributed to the school for which they had done nothing.
My children learned Spanish by attending Spanish school. While there my daughter started French lessons. After about 18 months I estimate she had learned as much as I had in five years. The reason being the teacher was French and they only spoke French in the class. Contrast this with her return to an English school where she had a little test to see what level of French she was at. She wrote two sides of A4 in perfect French thereby astounding the teachers, not that they ever tried to figure out why she was that good.
During French lessons at school my daughter was much perplexed because the teacher asked a question in French to which she replied in French. He told her she could reply in English if she wanted. Absolute nonsense and a good way to knock the stuffing out of her.
As far as I can tell not only has the teaching of foreign languages not improved, the take up among the students is falling. At primary school there have been lessons in French and Spanish but it is all a bit hit and miss and not at all coherent. It seemed to depend whether they had a teacher who could teach one or the other.
I know there are many people in this world who are able to speak English but I also know that if you want to sell something to a German you won’t do it by speaking English with him or her. I assume our froggy friends are much the same. It is a wonder that with so many people attending university these days, a few of them might have had the gumption to do something about our abysmal failure in teaching foreign languages. They need to sort out the teaching part and the examination part.
I have scrupulously avoided mentioning the invaders, both legal and illegal, many have no English and a good proportion of them will remain that way. I had to speak Spanish in Spain when dealing with officials and German in Germany and Switzerland and the Byzantine civil service in Brussels required French or Dutch so I chose French as my language. I use the word Byzantine reservedly because it was even worse than that. It took 9 months to get my carte de séjour to which I was legally entitled. If you think our civil servants are bad ….. The Town Hall in Brussels is Kafkaesque.
© well_chuffed 2025
