Essay: The Importance Of Poor Skills In Foreign Languages

During my childhood I always wanted to go abroad and always felt a big interest for other countries’ culture. Actually, when I was a teenager I got the opportunity to travel a lot with my parents. During one of our trip I met a person who was able to speak six languages, at that moment I found that “really cool”. By going often on a trip with my relatives, it turned out that I really like traveling and discovering different cultures. From those experiences I learned that mastering a foreign language turn out useful when you’re going abroad. As well, I started to notice that most of the French people that are abroad aren’t able to speak English or even understand any word of it. I started to wonder why French people have so poor skills in foreign languages,

In fact, the education system in France relies a lot on mathematics, science, French grammar, literature and other foundation courses. However, French education system lack of foreign languages courses, which explains the poor English proficiency that French people has. In 2014, researches have been made by the Education First organization (Indice de compétence en Anglais, 2015) and showed that France is ranked 29th in the world in terms of English proficiency. In addition, most of the most proficient in English countries are neighbors of France, like Germany or Netherlands. Although, the need of English proficiency is getting more and more important from years to years, parents feel that the need for their children to learn this foreign language is even more important. Even if the interest showed by the French population in learning English is still low compare to many other developed and developing countries, the rate is evolving every year. In fact we seen, a net increase in the level of English in France from 2013 to 2014 (Graph 1), even if it didn’t catch the score obtained in 2012 yet, it is on the right