Conjugate it like Beckham

New initiatives - and an English football star - are set to increase the desirability of foreign languages

Education ministers clapped their hands with glee when golden boy David Beckham announced that he was to start Spanish lessons following his summer signing to Real Madrid. "He will be a very useful representative to young people about how it can be cool to learn Spanish," said schools minister Stephen Twigg, in the kind of desperately uncool statement only a politician would make.

But Twigg's enthusiasm is understandable. Languages, unlike Beckham, are suffering something of an image problem.

"When they have a free choice, teenagers don't seem to want to study languages because they are perceived as difficult," says Theresa Tinsley, assistant director of the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT). "Languages appear to be such a long-term commitment and one whose benefits are not immediately apparent. And my experience of teenagers is that they can't think to the end of the week. If we want to sell languages, we must create something that is appealing to young people."

It is widely recognised that we British need to get better at learning languages other than our own. Relatively few of us are proficient in a foreign language and the numbers are especially low in Spanish. In 2002, only 8 per cent of GCSE candidates sat Spanish - compared with 51 per cent in French. This despite the fact that more of us travel to Spain than to any other county, and despite Spanish being the second most important language for business in Britain.

And the situation is set to worsen. Last December the Government announced curriculum reforms which means that it will no longer be compulsory for children above 14 to study a foreign language.

The fear is that these reforms will cause the numbers taking languages to fall even further. And such fears appear justified: a poll of 393 schools in England carried out by CILT found that 29 per cent of schools will follow the proposals and make languages optional, and 25 per cent were considering doing so.

It is such figures that prompted CILT this June to launch a new campaign called "Languages Work". The campaign is aimed at persuading Key Stage 3 students to take a language even when they aren't being forced to and is designed to prevent, even reverse, just such a drop in numbers.

Languages Work is aimed at the students via those who advise and teach them. The campaign is intended to increase the desirability of studying a language among students. CILT hopes to do this by increasing the awareness of what you can do with languages and to develop children's sense of how languages might fit in with their own career path. They hope to turn children onto languages rather than turn them off, and so ensure that that even those 14-year-olds who no longer have to will continue to study languages.

Chris Lintott, an astronomy student at Cambridge University, is just the sort of student Tinsley and her colleagues will be targeting. He took GCSE German only because he was absolutely forced to. "I hated languages. I didn't have a natural flair for them and I couldn't wait to drop them. If I could have swapped my German GCSE for a science one, I would have done so like a shot. Although in retrospect I'm glad I did study it. Now I wish I could speak it better."

Languages Work is primarily aimed at careers adviser officers and teachers. First of all it will help to signpost the materials and information available to teachers at each stage of education. "We want them to be able to deliver effective and realistic messages about careers which involve languages to pupils and students aged 14 and upwards," says Theresa Tinsley.

It will provide teachers with up-to-date information on how languages are used in working life. Previously much of the information that schools had on this was pretty limited and was fast becoming out of date. With the technological revolution and use of the internet the need for languages in work has increased enormously. Languages aren't only needed in careers like interpreting and translation. Whether you are a website designer, a PA or a market researcher, you could benefit from having another language. "We need to show teenagers how languages can be used to broaden their opportunities, and how they aren't an alternative but an addition to their chosen career," says Tinsley.

CILT is also keen to stress that German and French aren't the only languages that are useful. Mandarin and Arabic are useful for international diplomacy, and on a domestic level Bengali, Turkish and Urdu are essential to many local authorities and government bodies.

In the coming year CILT will be taking its message across the United Kingdom in the form of a travelling roadshow. It will be going around the country distributing information to language teachers and careers teachers in each area.

It is essential that CILT gets its message across. While the necessity for language learning is constantly decreasing, the necessity for languages is ever increasing.

As Dr Nicholas Hammond, lecturer in French at Cambridge University says: "Making languages not compulsory is utterly perverse. We are meant to be becoming a more integrated part of Europe. But the Government's proposal will perpetuate the culture of isolationism and the idea that somehow it is quite all right to sit at home and not to learn another language - or even worse to go to a country and not make the effort to communicate in their language, which is of course something that the Brits are famous for."

Such an image is not one Britain wants to perpetuate. "You can spot the English a mile off," says Anne Patel, a Londoner who lives part of the year in Spain.

"They tend to shout a lot. They'll say, 'Two beers, mate' and then when the Spanish don't understand them they'll just bellow - as if it's because the person is an imbecile and not because they're actually speaking the wrong language." They might make some attempt to speak the language- but it is little more than token. "They'll say, 'Grassy arse' sometimes. Or they'll do Spanglish and put 'o's on the end of words clearly thinking, 'Oh, that'll make it Spanish'."

So it seems that what is needed all round is a change of image. Beckham's Spanish aspirations haven't passed CILT by. "We'd love to get David Beckham involved," says Tinsley. "When we heard that he was learning Spanish, we sent him a copy of our book." She adds wistfully: "He hasn't written back to us yet."