Britain’s Foreign Language Failures
Tuesday, 3rd March 2009
When it comes to foreign language learning, Brits are generally perceived amongst the international community to be ‘lax’.
Although up until now this fact has largely reflected poorly on us Brits simply in terms of showing a certain cultural and linguistic ignorance, it now seems that the effect of our foreign language shortcomings could me even more profound.
Indeed in February of this year, an article in The Times addressed the notion that “Britain’s reliance on foreigners’ willingness to learn English is self-defeating.”
According to the article, our general lack of ability when it comes to languages means that we are missing out on the European job market, and putting the thousands of multilingual ‘continentals’ at a huge advantage.
On the subject of the issues and protests of late pertaining to foreign workers in the UK who are perceived to be taking precious jobs that could be taken by Brits, the article points out that “the laws that let foreign workers displace British ones give British workers exactly the same rights from Salonica to Sarajevo. British workers - and most of their employers - are simply too tongue-tied to invoke them.”
Often quoted as a reason for the lack of people in the UK who can speak a foreign language is an intrinsic ‘inability’ to learn languages. This, I’m sure, would be dispelled by most people doing research into the subject right from the start – as the author of the article in the Times states “it is, of course, nonsense to suggest that a geographical accident of birth might correlate with a congenital inability to learn foreign languages.”
The most likely explanation for the issues surrounding foreign language learning in Britain is in fact, the lack of importance attached to foreign language learning at all levels. This is mainly because of the fact that English is so widely spoken worldwide, and applies not only to people on a personal level, but also to in terms of wider educational policies.
Foreign languages have long lacked emphasis in the UK school system, and in recent times (5 years ago to be exact) Estelle Morris’s termination of the requirement for all GSCE students to learn at least one foreign language was a further nail in the coffin.
Although the UK is now aiming for the official EU goal of teaching all schoolchildren two non-native European languages, numbers of pupils taking French and German GCSEs have fallen by nearly half since 2001.
The number of university students to take degrees in modern languages is also dwindling, and as a result, the amount of UK graduates who go on to specialize in translation and interpreting in the EU is almost non-existent too.
It is true that steps are now in place to try and improve the situation with regard to foreign language learning in schools especially, but it will doubtlessly take a while yet before any marked effects of their implementation are seen.
In the meantime therefore, any additional ways to learn or revise language skills should be grabbed with both hands, whether it be for young children at the start of their education, for teenagers and young adults at the latter stages of their schooling, or professionals who want to up-skill and make themselves as employable as possible both in the UK and on a European level too.
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Tags: english, spanish, french, german, italian, learning, languages, language, tailor-made, course, evening course, language learning
Posted by Laura Harrison under Attitudes to Language Learning, In the news,
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