The chairman of the German teachers’ union, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, said that English lessons should be dropped from the curriculum of elementary school students, DPA reported.
“We think that English classes are redundant and that they can be replaced, for example, by reading lessons,” he told German public broadcaster ARD. “We need to pay more attention to learning the basic skills in primary school – which are reading, writing and arithmetic.”
His words were prompted by debates in Germany about the poor results of the International Primary Reading Study (PIRLS, known in Germany and by the acronym IGLU), presented in May.
It is clear from them that a quarter of fourth graders in the federal republic cannot read as they should. Comparatively, primary school students in Germany perform much worse than their peers in many other countries in reading skills.
Last year, the results of the IQB, another educational index measuring the skills of students in the 4th grade through a series of tests, showed that the federal republic was regressing in maths and German skills in elementary school.
In some schools, teaching English may make sense, Meidinger said. “But we have classes where 70, 80, 90 percent of the children are from a migrant background, who have a grossly inadequate knowledge of German.”
English classes, he said, set the wrong priorities. The level of knowledge acquisition between students in an elementary course varies so much that when they go to an intermediate course, “almost everyone has to start from scratch again anyway.”
Meidinger also called for greater support in the pre-school stage of education. “And of course we have to address the teacher shortage, otherwise we’ll never be able to tackle the problem,” he said.
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Assessment 4.7 from 13 voice.
2023-06-10 05:23:00
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