Language learning ‘slowly recovering from the pandemic’ – report

The popularity of learning languages at Northern Ireland's schools is "slowly recovering from the pandemic", a report by the British Council has found.

The Language Trends Northern Ireland report found that the decline in language learning at post-primary schools is plateauing, with Spanish emerging as the most popular, overtaking French.

The research was led by Dr Ian Collen, director of the Northern Ireland Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (NICILT) at Queen's University Belfast, and follows a previous report which found that language lessons were "hardest hit" during Covid-19.

This year's report found that Spanish is now the language most frequently taught in Northern Ireland's schools at both GCSE and A-level, overtaking French as the most popular GCSE language in summer 2021.

Up until 2021 French was the most studied language at GCSE, however, the language has been on a steep decline since the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, Irish has remained relatively stable at GCSE since 2007, and at A-level, it has now replaced French as the second most popular language.

German figures continue to decline, with the subject offered only in 17% of responding schools at Key Stage 3, and nearly a 50% decrease in uptake at GCSE from 2002 to 2022.

Schools also offer several languages as part of extra-curricular or enrichment subjects at Key Stage 4, including Polish, Portuguese, Arabic and Mandarin, with a growing number of schools offering newcomer pupils the opportunity to take exams in their home or community languages.

Despite this, there has been a sharp decline in the uptake of these languages at GCSE during the pandemic.

In terms of languages that students would like to learn, Italian came out on top. Almost one in five (19%) of Year 9 pupils expressed an interest in learning Italian in addition to the language(s) they already learn at school, followed by Spanish and then Irish.