As you like it:Catching Up in an Age of Global English

I was re-reading a report today of a study into the future of the English language, published in 2007.

The report, 'As You Like It: Catching Up in an Age of Global English', focuses on various issues, including the continuing fall in the number of school and university students in the UK who study a language other than their mother tongue.

The pessimistic view expressed in the report about the state of foreign language learning in the UK seems to be born out by an article in the Times Higher Education last week,  with the headline:

"Tongue-tied UK badly equipped to join in the conversation of nations"

This report contains some thought-provoking figures, for example:

There has been a general fall in the number of people applying to UK universities this year :

Much of this decrease is explained by a sharp decline in applications from older students - those in their twenties as distinct from school-leavers aged 18 among whom the application rate is down only slightly.

The biggest worry is the marked decline in languages and related studies. There has long been anxiety that the new funding arrangements would adversely affect language studies, partly because many language courses require an additional year of study and thus an additional year's worth of debt. Now we have evidence. Applications to European language courses are down by 11.2 per cent, those to non-European languages are down by 21.5 per cent: both decreases are well above the average decline across all subjects.

The writer of the article: Sir Adam Roberts, is president of the British Academy. He expresses concerns raised in As You Like It, such as: 

We Brits are at risk of becoming a nation of monoglots in a world of polyglots. 

All this contrasts starkly with the article from the ABC I referred to in a previous post. The 25,000 Spaniards contributing to the National Insurance Scheme in the UK and the 40,000 Spanish students taking a language course somewhere in the UK each year.

I found myself nodding on reading the following reflection on learning another language in an article published in the Guardian yesterday: 

the initial years of studying a language are tough: there is no escape from the grind of learning how to conjugate verbs, construct sentences and to absorb enough words to begin to understand what is written and said.

To elect to do this, young boys and girls need to know that, like practising a musical instrument, designing clothes or playing a sport, the end-result will be worthwhile. They need teachers who can inspire them, classmates who encourage them and families who understand the value of the skill. In Britain, none of this exists to a sufficient degree.

 

Let's hope our students are not reluctant to learn another language and see it as something useful!!!

If you need some arguments to convince them, there are lots in this New York Times article:

English Is Global, So Why Learn Arabic?

You could give each student or group of students one of the different views put forward by the 6 debaters - all of them coincide in the desirability for everyone to speak at least one other language.

And you can also read what the readers of the New York Times have to say on the matter.

Why not follow this up with some essay writing practice:

"Everyone should learn at least one foreign language" Why?