French Fights for Its Future in Flemish Classrooms as English Pulls Ahead

French occupies a paradoxical position in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium. Once the language of administration, diplomacy and social advancement, it now competes with the pervasive presence of English in education, media and youth culture. Yet French remains an official language of both Belgium and the European Union, and it continues to carry real weight in professional life. A new review published in Discover Education by Filip Verroens of Ghent University synthesises policy documents, empirical studies, education reports and teacher perspectives to explain how this tension between declining everyday relevance and persistent institutional importance is playing out in Flemish schools, and what it would take to reverse the slide.

The study adopts a narrative literature review methodology, drawing together a deliberately heterogeneous body of evidence. Sources were selected for their relevance to two research questions: how policy choices, didactic practices and sociocultural attitudes shape the current position of French as a foreign language, and what implications the findings hold for improving its teaching. Priority was given to publications from 2019 onwards, reflecting ongoing educational reforms, though older seminal works were retained for historical context. The analysis proceeded through thematic clustering, organising recurring themes into historical-institutional, pedagogical and sociocultural dimensions, while keeping a careful distinction between descriptive synthesis, interpretative analysis and normative recommendations.

That historical context turns out to be essential for understanding the present. French has been present in written documents in the region since the twelfth century, when the Flemish elite gradually gallicised. Dutch re-emerged as the language of economic life in the fourteenth century, French regained prominence under Burgundian and Habsburg rule in the seventeenth, and its dominance receded again by the late nineteenth century under pressure from the Flemish Movement, which championed Dutch. The result is a language that is no longer taken for granted in Flemish education but must be continually legitimised against English and other rivals. Belgium’s federal structure compounds the difficulty: three language communities each run their own education system, producing divergent curricula, teacher qualification requirements and reform trajectories, while the principle of linguistic territoriality limits opportunities for natural exposure to French in Flanders.

French remains compulsory in large parts of the Flemish curriculum, in both primary and secondary schooling, but the number of instructional hours varies across schools and recent trends show a reduction in French hours in favour of English or STEM subjects. For a long time French functioned as the default second language in Flanders; it is now positioned as a foreign language after English, which has become the first foreign language taught. A key structural turning point came with a 2004 decree making French compulsory from the third grade of primary education, replacing a patchwork in which schools chose whether and when to offer it. Language awareness and language initiation programmes, designed to build positive attitudes toward multilingualism through early, low-stakes exposure, exist but remain optional and unevenly implemented, limiting their systemic impact.

One of the most striking findings concerns the informal dominance of English. Empirical research indicates that pupils at the end of primary education often possess a larger English vocabulary than a French one, despite receiving no formal instruction in English, a pattern attributed to the saturation of media and digital environments with English content. Teacher preparation compounds the problem in the other direction. Survey data and advice from the Flemish Education Council show that many primary-school teachers feel uncertain speaking French in class, roughly one third hesitate to use it orally, which pushes classroom practice toward written skills, grammar and spelling at the expense of spoken communication. Many student teachers begin training at A2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, functional but insufficient for confident, spontaneous classroom use, while a B1 level is generally considered necessary.

In secondary education, a major obstacle to evaluating French is the absence of systematic, large-scale assessment data. Unlike several neighbouring countries, Flanders has no standardised language tests for French; the recently introduced centralised tests cover only Dutch and mathematics. Insights therefore rest on teacher testimonies, interviews with teacher trainers, education reports and small-scale classroom studies. Across these sources a consistent pattern emerges: since the early 2000s, curricular reforms have prioritised communicative language teaching, with a task-oriented approach as the dominant reference point, emphasising functional language use and authentic interaction. This stands in tension with knowledge-based approaches foregrounding explicit grammar and vocabulary instruction. In practice, teachers report that the task-oriented approach is sometimes applied narrowly, with strong emphasis on oral interaction but insufficient systematic vocabulary development and grammatical support. A case study comparing three teachers found that a French-speaking teacher adopted a more traditional, knowledge-oriented method while two Dutch-speaking colleagues followed a communicative, orally oriented one, illustrating how background and training produce divergent practices within the same framework.

Motivation is the other persistent fault line. A systematic investigation by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, drawing on Gardner and Lambert’s distinction between instrumental motivation, learning a language for practical purposes, and integrative motivation, reflecting interest in the language and its speakers, found that pupils expressed slightly more positive attitudes toward English, though their attitude toward French was not negative. French was perceived as more difficult and less trendy, while English was associated with youth culture; pupils reported frequent listening to English-language music and rare consumption of French-language media. Instrumental motivation was slightly stronger for French, given its status as a national language. Nearly twenty years later, a partial replication study among 62 pupils from six schools in the Bruges region largely confirmed these results: the gap had not diminished, pupils preferred English as a school subject and would continue learning it even if optional, far less so for French, and anxiety levels were higher when learning French. Similar patterns have been observed in the Netherlands and Germany, suggesting a broader European shift rather than a purely local phenomenon.

Higher education mirrors these difficulties. Studies point to heterogeneous linguistic profiles among students entering French language programmes, with some lacking expected grammatical accuracy or lexical breadth. Concerns gained visibility in 2019 when forty-two French lecturers from fourteen Flemish colleges and universities published a petition highlighting a widening gap between students’ entry level and the competences required for French language degrees, triggering national press coverage. Enrolment data from Flemish universities between 2013 and 2021 show French consistently ranked third, after English and Dutch and roughly on par with Spanish, attracting a specialised cohort often motivated by careers in education, translation, international relations or public administration. Meanwhile the teaching profession itself faces strain: recruitment for modern foreign language teachers in the United Kingdom reached only 43 percent of government targets in 2024, OECD data indicate similar shortages in Germany, and in Flanders lateral entry into teaching is rising, with second-career teachers sometimes appointed without full qualifications and reporting they feel less prepared.

Recent initiatives offer partial remedies. The Flemish Language Platform, established in 2019 by representatives of multiple universities and later joined by teachers from outside academia, coordinates action in support of Dutch, modern foreign languages and classical languages. CLIL, or Content and Language Integrated Learning, in which a non-language subject is taught through a foreign language, was long avoided in Flanders due to concerns about Frenchification but was officially authorised in 2014. Its implementation remains limited to secondary education and is not systematically integrated across grades: in 2021, 137 Flemish schools offered CLIL, 76 using French as the medium of instruction and 113 using English. Research suggests CLIL can boost motivation and language outcomes, though effects depend on programme design, teacher expertise and continuity. Technological change adds a new variable, as AI tools that generate exercises, feedback and translations complicate traditional assessment, with research noting that distinguishing student-produced from AI-generated output is becoming harder.

The review’s broader argument is that the stakes extend well beyond the classroom. Analyses of vacancy descriptions from the Flemish public employment service show that solid command of French remains a requirement for a substantial proportion of job profiles, more frequently than English in several sectors, and employers’ organisations such as VOKA, VBO and Unizo have endorsed the Language Plan, expressing concern about declining French proficiency among young graduates. The OECD reports that around two in five vacancies registered with the Brussels public employment service require both French and Dutch. There is also an equity dimension: foreign-language proficiency is shaped by exposure beyond school, and participation in extracurricular activities is socially differentiated, so if formal opportunities decline, wealthier families may compensate through paid language camps and immersion courses, widening socioeconomic disparities. The review recommends system-wide proficiency monitoring aligned with CEFR benchmarks, balanced didactic approaches integrating communication with systematic grammar and vocabulary support, strengthened teacher education prioritising oral French, and greater curricular coherence across educational networks. Structural proposals under debate, including making French optional in primary teacher training or reconfiguring qualifications across school phases, each carry trade-offs. What emerges clearly is that no single cause explains French’s predicament in Flanders, and no single fix will resolve it; coordinated, evidence-informed action across institutions is what the evidence demands.

Subject of Research: The status and teaching of French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice

Article Title: French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice

Article References: Verroens, F. (2026). French as a foreign language in Flemish education policy and practice. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 987. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02191-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02191-5

Keywords: French language education, Flanders, language policy, foreign language pedagogy, multilingualism, teacher training, learner motivation, CLIL, English dominance, Belgium, CEFR, language assessment