First European Survey on Language Competences

I have been following the project to assess the level of European students' language competence since I first heard about the initiative when preparing to give a general picture of European language learning and teaching at the 21st APPI conference back in 2007 in Lisbon.

ANNE ROBINSON - Where are we heading? This talk will examine the main trends in English Language teaching in Europe. Areas such as starting age, contact hours, content-based learn- ing, teacher training and qualifications will be covered. 

Talk – All Teacher Development – Young Learners Room: Paris (150 seats)

I knew from the Surveylang website that the first survey had been carried out an that the results and findings were due to be published in 2012.

I remember checking the Surveylang website back in May to see whether the findings would be published soon.  They seemed imminent, but were not on the site yet.

The survey tested the two most widely taught European languages (from English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) in each country from a representative sample of pupils in their final year of lower secondary education.

The survey assessed students’ proficiency in listening, reading and writing. A sample of approximately 1,500 students per language tested, per country was used.

So while reading through an email with updates from Its magazine, I was rather surprised to find that when I followed the link below to the news article, that it was reporting the results of the Surveylang survey.  

Teenagers in England, France and Spain are among the least competent at languages. From BBC News. http://bbc.in/Lm4gne

Why was I surprised?  Because I hadn't heard a thing about the publication of the findings, yet I try and keep up to date with articles in the press on language teaching and learning, I receive emails from various organisations, I do a lot of work for the University of Cambridge ESOL (who were VERY much involved in the survey) and friends and colleagues very often pass on news like this.

Yet I hadn't heard a thing about the results being published!   Highly surprising!!!

I thought that this news (and the findings from the survey) would be very relevant and of interest to a lot of you out there, so I decided to write this post!

Here are the links to the final report  (241 pages long!)  It contains lots of information about the survey and the results.  I was impressed by the tasks participants were asked to complete in order to assess their reading, writing and listening skills.  (Speaking was not assessed in this survey)

and also to the Executive Summary (15 pages).

You can also read all about the Survey and the findings on the University of Cambridge ESOL's website here.