Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...only person who thinks so. Earlier this month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled an "emergency plan" for teaching foreign languages in the nation's schools with the lofty objective that "all our high school students must become bilingual, and some should be trilingual." Why the panic? Because as Sarkozy noted, a nation that spends 5.8% of its annual GDP on education - the fifth-highest percentage in the world - simply must do better than its current rank of 69th among 109 countries on the standardized Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To that end, Sarkozy has proposed exposing students...
...faces look a little nervous and the words are spoken a bit timidly - all rather normal for a group of French students learning to speak English. But the hesitant responses aren't coming in a classroom where foreign-language instruction is another obligatory grind in a long day of courses. Instead, these 18-to-25-year-olds are paying up to $6,000 annually to master a language they all took for six years in high school before earning their baccalaureate degrees and entering the job market...
...change their ways and encourage students to speak more in foreign-language classes will be one challenge to overcome. Another is confronting the contradiction that comes with promoting foreign-language study among students and continuing France's long-standing policies aimed at protecting and promoting the use of the French language at home. The Academie Française began its mission of purging the French language of impurities - often words taken from other languages - way back in 1635. The key objective of the country's 25-year-old exception culturelle is ensuring that French-language music, film and other cultural...
...These efforts to trumpet the virtues of the French language may inadvertently decrease the allure of foreign tongues to many in France - especially among students who are made to feel they mustn't attempt to utter a word of what's often called la langue de Shakespeare until they've mastered it on paper. "I think a lot of French people are hesitant to speak another language at what could be considered the expense of French," says Karin Hull, who has taught English at Berlitz for four years. "The legacy of cultural protectionism is one factor, and the way foreign...
...collective shrugging in France at the charges? Part of the reason may be that other illegal political funding schemes were commonplace in France from the 1970s to the early 1990s when a series of laws were passed to crack down on the practice. The French also tend to be more scornful of public officials who use corruption to enrich themselves personally, which Chirac isn't accused of doing in this case...