Ever since my first interview to train to be a teacher, people have been advising me that to teach in England, I would need to brush up my French. Having read all the headlines about England's shortage of language teachers, I thought they were exaggerating, after all, I had two languages already.
Having enough to get through with the PGCE and MA, I let time go by and forgot all about my French until it lost me my first teaching job after a year, and started to really limit my opportunities for the future. I'm still pretty bitter about the situation in England - making languages an optional subject at GCSE was what ruined my career in England before it even started.
Anyway, during the year before I came to Germany, I enrolled on a distance learning French AS-Level course. I was working at a languages college after all, so I had the opportunity to practise my speaking with native speakers, use resources at work, and they even agreed to let me sit the exams there.
And then my life changed and I moved to Germany. Luckily for me in some ways, the system is completely different here. Of course you still have to have a degree in your subjects but once you have a job you can teach many subjects having never studied them since you were in school yourself. I have one colleague who teach sport, music, history, geography and social studies. This system means that if I really wanted to teach French and felt confident enough, it would be possible. Even better than that is that, although it is proving a trial to get a contract to work here permanently, it's finally not because of my lack of French! (Also, it turns out that what has meant that I can work here is my Spanish because I can't qualify as a German teacher for obvious reasons and I can't qualify as an English teacher because I have never studied English - crazy.)
Unfortunately, although I have joined a conversation class here and worked my way to the end of the course, I can't have the time off work to go to England and take the exams. I even looked into the possibility of taking the exams at the international school here in Bremen, but they don't teach AS or A Level. While this is a disappointment, I really enjoyed the course anyway and am considering the A-Level in a couple of years time. I plan to carry on with French one way or another once I have taken some time out to work on my German and Spanish a bit more, especially as my Spanish is likely to be more of a challenge with an older teaching group next year for the first time since my training.
French was my first foreign language and it will always have a place in my heart and in our office, so I will come back to it and am glad I stuck it out with this course.
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