ABSTRACT

English and modern foreign languages: an intercultural perspective It may seem, at fi rst glance, that English and modern foreign languages (henceforth MFL) are ideal bedfellows: after all, both are centrally concerned with language, and language as used in the contemporary world at that. There is, of course, much truth in this observation, and, at least since the Bullock Report urged language across the curriculum from the 1970s onwards, there have been several worthy (and often successful) attempts to build on the cross-curricular connection in secondary schools. However, forging a working model of collaboration has not always been straightforward. The pedagogies of English and MFL have developed in contrasting ways, which has tended to mean that although, potentially at least and if handled sensitively, each has been able to illuminate the other, there have been practical problems in implementing co-operation except on a fairly superfi cial level. MFL teachers have been known (often with some justifi cation) to complain vociferously that their pupils were ill-prepared by English colleagues in terms of any sort of detailed knowledge of grammar or even language workings more generally, whilst the standard English teachers’ response that this is precisely the role of MFL teachers, as grammar knowledge is not needed for English teaching and may actually inhibit spontaneity, simply will not do any more (and probably never did). The reality in most schools, I suspect, lies somewhere in between these poles. However, when English and MFL departments attempted to plan and realise a ‘language awareness’ scheme of work at a school I taught in during the 1980s, we rapidly found each other’s lesson plans so alien to the spirit of our respective subject teaching and learning methodologies (for MFL, meticulously planned to the smallest detail of each pupil-teacher exchange; for English, typically open-ended and far more fl exibly exploratory) that the scheme pretty quickly ground to a halt – although some interesting and imaginative work had emerged, and we were able to continue crosscurricular activity in other ways.