The Importance of the Second Foreign Language in Primary Education in the Czech Republic and Potential Consequences of its Abolition as Compulsory Subject
Abstract
The second foreign language (German, French, Russian or Spanish) is obligatory at primary school in the Czech Republic since 2013. The present study aims at investigating the potential consequences of the reform prepared by the Czech Ministry of Education, making the second foreign language at primary school again only optional.
The first part of the paper introduces the social, economic, and cognitive factors defining the importance of the second foreign language at primary school. The main part of the paper, based especially on data from the Slovak Republic, having made the same reform in 2015, explains that after the reform, the decrease in number of pupils learning second foreign language would be considerable, especially affecting economically disadvantaged families and regions.